THE    NOVEL 
of  TOMORROW 

AND  THE  SCOPE 
OF  FICTION 


SAMUEL  HOPKINS  ADAMS 

MARY  AUSTIN 

JAMES  BRANCH  CABELL 

FLOYD  DELL 

WALDO  FRANK 

ZONA  GALE 

JOSEPH  HERGESHEIMER 

HARVEY  O'HIGGINS 

ROBERT  HERRICK 

HENRY  KITCHELL  WEBSTER 

WILLIAM  ALLEN  WHITE 

EDITH  FRANKLIN  WYATT 


C^&«^/f 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

AND 

The  Scope  of  Fiction 


THE  NOVEL 

''of 

TOMORROW 

AND  THE  SCOPE  OF  FICTION 


By  Twelve 
American   Novelists 


03- 


INDIANAPOLIS 

THE  BOBBS-MERRILL  COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 


Copyright,  1922 

By  The  New  Republic 

Copyright,  1922 

By  The  Bobbs-Merrill  Company 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


PRESS   OF 

BRAUNWORTH   &   CO. 

BOOK    MANUFACTURERS 

BROOKLYN,    N.    Y. 


NOTE 

The  articles  in  this  volume  first  ap- 
peared in  a  supplement  to  The  New 
Republic  of  April  12,  1922,  on  "The 
Novel  of  Tomorrow  and  the  Scope  of 
Fiction."  Thanks  to  the  suggestion  of 
The  Bobbs-Merrill  Company  and  to 
the  generosity  of  the  several  contribu- 
tors, they  now  reappear  in  book  form 
for  the  benefit  of  the  Authors'  League 
Fund  for  writers  in  distress.  A  few 
changes  and  corrections  have  been 
made.  We  regret  that  previous  ar- 
rangements on  their  part  prevent  the 
inclusion  of  Willa  S.  Gather's  "The 
Novel  Demeuble"  and  Theodore  Drei- 
ser's "The  Scope  of  Fiction." 

The  Editors,  The  New  Republic. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Apollyon  vs.  Pollyanna — 

Samuel  Hopkins  Adams 3 

The  American  Form  of  the  Novel — 

Mary    Austin ll 

A  Note  on  Alcoves — 

James  Branch  Cabell 25 

The  Difference  Between  Life  and  Fiction — 

Floyd    Dell 39 

The  Major  Issue — 

Waldo  Frank 51 

The  Novel  of  Tomorrow — 

Zona    Gale 65 

The  P'rofession  of  Novelist — 

Joseph  Hergesheimer 75 

The  New  Novel — 

Robert  Herrick 91 

A  Note  on  the  New  Novel— 

Harvey  O'Higgins 105 

A  Brace  of  Definitions  and  a  Short  Code — 

Henry  Kitchell  Webster 113 

Splitting  Fiction  Three  Ways — 

William  Allen  White     .......  123 

"Dreaming  True" — 
Edith  Franklin  Wyatt    .     ...     .     ......  137 


APOLLYON  VS.  POLLYANNA 
Samuel  Hopkins  Adams 


THE  NOVEL 

OF 

TOMORROW 

I 

APOLLYON  VS.  POLLYANNA 

The  scope  of  fiction?  Why 
"scope"?  The  word  implies  breadth 
of  choice  and  treatment,  and  that  in 
an  art  already  dangerously  subversive 
of  the  present  age's  vitalizing  prin- 
ciple of  conduct,  benevolent  censor- 
ship.    That  way  peril  lies. 

Let  us  endeavor  to  approach  this 
subject  from  the  view-point  of  that 
admirable  organization,  so  represen- 
tative of  our  best  and  most  decorous 
minds,  the  League  for  the  Promotion 
of  Prudery.  As  the  League  points  out 
3 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

in  its  introductory  enunciation  of 
principles,  the  error  and  sin  of  mod- 
ernist literature  is  that  it  tends  to  por- 
tray life  as  it  is.  All  respectable  per- 
sons realize  that  life  in  many  of  its 
phases  is  wholly  unfit  for  the  consid- 
eration of  the  pure.  Take,  for  ex- 
ample, the  regrettable  matter  of  birth 
and  all  that  precedes  it.  If  our  novel- 
ists, playwrights  and  publicists  would 
unanimously  agree  to  refrain  from 
any  mention  of  natal  or  pre-natal  pro- 
cesses, is  it  too  much  to  hope  that  we 
could  presently  raise  up  a  generation 
which  should  retain  its  unsullied  men- 
tal innocency  until,  let  us  say,  the 
legal  age  of  twenty-one,  or  even  con- 
ceivably later?  Leave  these  undesir- 
able matters  to  the  biologists.  No- 
body reads  biology  anyway. 

It  is  gratifying  to  note  that  the  great 
and  virtuous  commonwealth  of  Penn- 
sylvania has  already  initiated  the  good 
work  by  barring  from  its  motion  pic- 
ture theaters  any  indication  of  how 
population  is  maintained.  A  young 
4 


APOLLYON  VS.  POLLYANNA 

couple,  though  they  be  pasted  over 
with  marriage  certificates  thick  as 
hotel  labels  on  a  bargain-sale  trunk, 
may  not  be  shown  in  the  provocative 
act  of  purchasing  a  perambulator  for 
a  prospective  baby.  Even  that  galli- 
naceous makeshift,  the  stork,  is  ban- 
ished from  the  screen.  Ohio  is  not  far 
behind.  A  publisher  who  ventured  to 
invade  its  unsullied  borders  with  an 
edition  of  Rabelais  has  been  appre- 
hended. In  this  propitious  soil  the 
League  for  the  Promotion  of  Prudery 
is  quietly  working  to  have  the  Bible 
expurgated  and  the  Talmud  revised. 
Shakespeare  must  go. 

Eventually  as  public  support  ac- 
crues to  the  League  and  after  it  has 
cleansed  and  disinfected  fiction, 
poetry  and  the  drama,  it  purposes  to 
direct  its  attention  to  art  and  jour- 
nalism. 

It  must  not  be  inferred  that  all 
imaginative  creation,  per  se,  is  inter- 
dicted. Writers  may  still  hold  the 
mirror  up  to  nature,  provided  nature 
5 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

is  suitably  clad.    Modern  fashions  are 
regarded  as  impermissible. 

While  the  growing  strength  of  cen- 
sorship is  a  profound  satisfaction  and 
encouragement  to  the  truly  upright,  it 
is  evident  that  this  method  can  never 
go  far  enough.  A  complete  Index  Ex- 
purgatorius  is  the  eventual  aim,  or 
better  still,  an  hidex  Prohibitus. 
Thus  far  there  has  been  devised  only 
a  broadly  modeled  White  List  here- 
with presented  for  consideration. 
Stories,  plays  and  poems  are  to  be  re- 
garded as  allowable  in  the  following 
classes : 

(a)  Political  and  business  stories 
wherein  honesty  triumphs. 

(b)  Sunday-school  stories. 

(c)  Children  and  farm  stories. 

(d)  Love  stories;  object,  matri- 
mony. 

(e)  Nature  stories,  though  it  must 
be  remembered  that  some  animals  are 
coarse  in  their  habits. 

It   is   the   League's  plan   to   license 
only  such  authors  as  subscribe  to  the 
6 


APOLLYON  VS.  POLLYANNA 

restrictions  above.  Others  will  be  for- 
bidden publication.  Can  any  genu- 
inely artistic  heart  fail  to  thrill  at  the 
prospect  of  a  brighter,  cleaner,  purer 
world,  wherein  all  the  books  will  be 
of  the  school  of  Harold  Bell  Wright  or 
Gene  Stratton-Porter;  wherein  Apoll- 
yon  and  all  his  legions  of  darkness 
will  flee  before  Pollyanna  with  her 
forces  of  sweetness  and  light? 


THE    AMERICAN    FORM    OF    THE 
NOVEL 

Mary  Austin 


II 


THE  AMERICAN  FORM  OF  THE 
NOVEL 

The  novel  has  always  concerned  it- 
self with  such  incidents  of  the  life 
performance  as  have  been  found  sig- 
nificant by  the  age  in  which  they  oc- 
cur. Its  scope  has  been  combat  when 
combat  was  the  major  occupation  of 
men.  As  the  necessity  of  social  ad- 
justment operated  over  the  lust  of 
conquest  the  long  story  reflected  and 
illustrated  the  process  of  such  adjust- 
ment. When  complete  stratification 
had  taken  place  in  European  society, 
the  story-telling  emphasis  shifted  to 
the  set  of  circumstances  by  which  the 
hero  was  introduced  into  the  social 
strata  in  which  he  was  henceforth  to 
function.  Thus,  where  the  Greek  long 
story  was  content  to  deal  with  the  ad- 
venture of  arms,  the  medieval  ro- 
ll 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

mance  made  a  feat  of  arms  the  means, 
subordinate  to  the  event,  of  the  hero's 
admission  into  high  society,  slaying 
the  enemy  as  a  prelude  to  manning 
the  king's  daughter  and  sharing  the 
kingdom. 

When,  however,  the  goal  of  man's 
serious  endeavor  became,  as  it  did  in 
the  last  century,  some  sort  of  success- 
ful escape  froin  social  certitude,  the 
scope  of  the  novel  was  extended  to  in- 
clude the  whole  ground  of  his  struggle 
and  its  various  objectives.  Then  came 
America  and  brought  a  state  of  things 
in  which  uncertainty  multiplied  as  to 
what  the  objective  of  man's  secret  and 
incessant  search  should  be.  Except  in 
a  limited,  personal  sense  we  have 
never  known  in  the  United  States  just 
which  of  us  is  villain  and  which  hero. 
In  addition  to  the  decay  of  recognized 
social  categories,  our  novelists  find 
themselves  under  the  necessity  of 
working  out  their  story  patterns  on  a 
set  of  shifting  backgrounds  no  two  of 
which  are  entirely  conformable.  I 
12 


THE  AMERICAN  FORM 

myself,  and  I  suspect  my  experience 
to  be  typical,  have  had  to  learn  three 
backgrounds,  as  distinct,  except  for 
the  language  spoken,  as  Paris,  Gopher 
Prairie  and  the  Scottish  Highlands. 
While  I  do  not  complain  to  the  gods 
of  these  things,  I  maintain  that  it  gives 
me  a  disadvantage  compared  to  Mr. 
Galsworthy,  say,  who,  however  rotten 
he  finds  the  warp  of  English  society 
to  be,  still  finds  it  regularly  spaced 
and  competent  to  sustain  the  design  of 
any  story  he  may  elect  to  weave. 

There  can  be,  of  course,  as  many 
arrangements  of  the  items  of  indi- 
vidual experience  as  there  are  ways 
in  which  experience  can  widely  hap- 
pen. But  these  are  not  so  many  as 
might  be  supposed.  Varieties  of  per- 
sonal adventure  are  more  or  less 
pulled  together  by  the  social  frame  in 
which  they  occur.  One  of  the  recog- 
nized criterions  of  veracity  in  a  novel 
is  the  question,  could,  or  couldn't,  the 
main  incident  have  occurred  in  that 
fashion  in  a  given  type  of  society.  But 
13 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

such  a  question  can  only  be  asked  by 
people  who  have  acquired  the  ca- 
pacity to  feel  truth  in  respect  to  their 
own  environment.  It  can  never  be 
asked  by  people  for  whom  apprecia- 
tions of  social  pattern,  as  it  affects  the 
literary  expression  of  experience, 
have  been  stereotj''ped  to  the  warp  of 
relationships  which  are  no  longer  ad- 
mitted as  social  determinants.  To 
readers  whose  souls  are  only  at  home 
in  states  of  feudal  dominance  or  de- 
pendence there  is  no  truth  whatever 
in  modern  realism. 

The  novel,  more  than  any  other 
written  thing,  is  an  attempt  to  per- 
suade, at  its  best  to  compel,  men  to 
give  over  for  a  moment  the  pursuit  of 
the  distant  goal,  and  savor  the  color, 
the  intensity  and  solidarity  of  experi- 
ence while  it  is  passing.  It  is  of  no 
particular  moment  which  one  of  the 
currents  of  experience  that  loop  and 
whirl  and  cascade  and  backwater 
through  the  stream  of  human  exist- 
ence, is  selected.  It  is  important, 
14 


THE  AMERICAN  FORM 

however,  that  it  be  presented  in  the 
idiom,  that  is  to  say,  in  the  Hfe  pat- 
tern, of  the  audience  for  whom  it  is  in- 
tended. 

For  every  novel  that  the  reviewer 
elects  for  critical  attention,  he  dis- 
cards a  dozen  others  of  possibly  equal 
workmanship,  for  no  reason  but  that 
they  deal  with  patterns  that  have 
ceased  to  have — or  perhaps  never  did 
have — constructive  relation  to  the  so- 
ciety in  which  we  live.  Or,  in  cases 
where  high  veracity  and  perfection  of 
form  compel  his  admiration,  as  in  The 
Age  of  Innocence,  he  makes  his  point 
out  of  the  very  failure  of  validity  in 
the  background,  itself  a  fragment  of 
an  earlier,  outworn  social  fabric.  Be- 
low the  limit  of  a  possible  claim  on  his 
attention,  every  reviewer  is  also  aware 
of  scores  of  novels,  eyeless  and  amor- 
phic, kept  moving  on  the  submerged 
social  levels  by  the  thousands  of  read- 
ers who  never  come  any  nearer  the 
surface  of  the  present  than  perhaps  to 
be  occasionally  chilled  by  it. 
15 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

Aside  from  questions  of  form,  is  not 
the  difference  between  novels  which 
compel  our  attention  and  those  we 
lightly  discard,  just  this  validity  of  re- 
lation between  social  warp  and  indi- 
vidual pattern?  What  I  mean  by 
pattern  is  the  arrangement  of  story 
elements  in  true  relations  to  the  social 
structure  by  which  they  are  displayed. 

It  is  not  necessary  that  the  support- 
ing structure  of  society  appear  as  sub- 
ject matter,  but  a  certain  clear  sense 
of  it  in  the  writer's  mind. 

It  is  hardly  possible  yet  in  America 
to  produce  so  smooth  an  over-woven 
piece  as  Mr.  Waddingtoii  of  Wyck, 
with  the  technique  of  one  of  those  de- 
tached motifs  of  Chinese  embroidery, 
in  which,  though  everywhere  to  be 
traced,  not  one  thread  of  the  sustain- 
ing fabric  is  visible.  Miss  Sinclair 
works  under  the  conviction  that  the 
social  structure  ought  never  to  be 
treated  by  the  novelist  as  part  of  his 
undertaking,  but  that,  I  suspect,  is  due 
to  her  never  having  worked  on  the 
16 


THE  AMERICAN  FORM 

disconcertingly  spaced  and  frequently 
sleazy  background  of  American  soci- 
ety. What  we  have  to  look  for  here  is 
the  ability,  on  the  part  of  the  writer,  to 
fix  upon  the  prophetic  trend  of  hap- 
penings. Such  a  novel  as  Main  Street 
should  sustain  itself  a  long  time  as  a 
record  of  our  discovery  of  the  Com- 
munity as  villain,  or,  if  you  feel  as 
some  of  us  do  toward  its  leading  lady, 
as  hero. 

It  is  this  necessity,  forced  upon  us 
by  recent  social  developments,  of 
finding  new,  because  as  yet  unde- 
clared, points  of  balance  in  the  ar- 
rangements of  the  American  elements 
of  story  design,  that  has  given  rise  to 
the  notion  that  in  America  the  novel 
need  not  concern  itself  with  form  pri- 
marily. But  this  can  hardly  be  the 
case  if  we  are  to  think  of  novel  writ- 
ing as  an  art,  subject  to  the  condition 
of  survival  in  time. 

Form  is  the  shape  a  story  acquires 
in  its  passage  from  the  mind  of  the 
author  to  his  audience.  That  all 
17 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

minds  are  much  alike  gives  to  all  fic- 
tion a  recognized  quality  of  form 
which  differentiates  what  goes  by  the 
name  of  literature  from  mere  reading 
matter.  The  minds  of  any  audience 
living  under  fairly  homogeneous  in- 
fluence acquire  a  characteristic  recep- 
tivity, a  peculiarly  native  manner  of 
turning  and  tasting  their  experience 
before  assimilating  it,  which  is  bound 
to  be  reflected  in  the  shape  of  the  ve- 
hicle in  which  experience  is  recorded 
and  passed  about.  The  American 
short  story  form  developed  out  of  our 
national  method  of  attack  on  the  im- 
mediate issue  with  attention  undi- 
vided by  any  concern  for  the  sequence 
of  events.  It  was,  in  fact,  the  lack  of 
sequence  in  our  experience  which 
made  the  short  story  for  a  long  time 
our  most  expressive  literary  vehicle. 
In  this  sense  form  in  connection 
with  novel  writing  becomes  a  matter 
of  the  span  of  perceptive  conscious- 
ness of  the  selected  audience.  This 
gives,  in  our  inchoate  American  life, 
18 


THE  AMERICAN  FORM 

the  greatest  latitude  of  incident,  but 
confines  the  novelist  rather  strictly  to 
a  democratic  structure.  It  deprives 
him  of  fixed  goals  of  social  or  finan- 
cial or  political  achievement  as  ter- 
minal points,  since  none  of  these 
things  has  any  permanence  in  the 
American  scheme  of  things.  The  ut- 
most the  American  novelist  can  hope 
for,  if  he  hopes  at  all  to  see  his  work 
included  in  the  literature  of  his  time, 
is  that  it  may  eventually  be  found  to 
lie  along  in  the  direction  of  the  grow- 
ing tip  of  collective  consciousness. 

Preeminently  the  novelist's  gift  is 
that  of  access  to  the  collective  mind. 
But  there  is  a  curious  secret  relation 
between  the  novelist's  point  of  access 
and  his  grasp  of  form — and  by  form  I 
mean  all  that  is  usually  included  in 
style,  plus  whatever  has  to  do  with  the 
sense  of  something  transacting  be- 
tween the  book  and  its  reader.  Who- 
ever lays  hold  on  the  collective  mind 
at  the  node  from  which  issues  the 
green  bough  of  constructive  change, 
19 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

finds  himself  impelled  toward  what  is 
later  discovered  to  be  the  prophetic 
form.  What,  after  all,  is  the  slow 
growth  of  appreciation  of  a  novelist  of 
the  first  rank,  but  the  simultaneous 
widening  of  our  social  consciousness 
to  a  sense  of  its  own  direction? 

American  novelists  are  often  ac- 
cused of  a  failure  of  form.  But  is  this 
anything  more  than  an  admission  of 
failure  of  access  on  the  part  of  the 
critics?  Characteristic  art  form  is  sel- 
dom perfected  until  the  culture  of 
which  it  is  an  expression  comes  to 
rest.  Of  all  the  factors  influencing  the 
American  novel  form,  I  should  expect 
the  necessity,  inherent  in  a  democratic 
society,  of  conforming  more  directly, 
at  any  given  moment,  to  the  state  of 
the  collective  consciousness  rather 
than  to  its  direction,  to  be  the  deter- 
mining item.  This  is  what,  generally 
speaking,  conditions  the  indispensable 
quality  of  access.  Under  the  demo- 
cratic condition  it  can  be  achieved 
only  by  participation.  There  is  no 
20 


THE  AMERICAN  FORM 

place  in  the  American  consciousness 
for  the  superior  being  standing  about 
with  his  hands  in  his  pockets,  "pass- 
ing remarks." 

The  democratic  noveHst  must  be  in- 
side his  novel  rather  than  outside  in 
the  Victorian  fashion  of  Thackeray 
or  the  reforming  fashion  of  Mr.  Wells. 
He  may,  like  Mr.  Sherwood  Anderson, 
be  so  completely  inside  as  to  be  un- 
clear in  his  conclusion  about  the  goal, 
but  there  he  is,  Americanly,  on  his 
way.  The  reference  of  personal  con- 
duct to  an  overhead  Judgment  which 
forced  the  earlier  novelist  to  assume 
the  god  in  the  disposition  of  his  char- 
acters, has  here  given  place  to  a  true 
democratic  desire  of  man  to  see  him- 
self as  he  is  seen  by  the  people  with 
whom  he  does  business.  His  search  is 
not  so  much  for  judgment  as  for  reve- 
lation, quick,  nervous  appreciations 
of  place,  relationship  and  solidarity. 
But  in  every  case  the  validity  of  the 
American  form  will  rest  upon  that  in- 
tuitive access  to  the  collective  con- 
21 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

sciousness,  which  it  is  the  dream,  and 
probably  the  mission  of  democracy  to 
achieve. 


A  NOTE  ON  ALCOVES 

by 
James  Branch  Cabell 


Ill 

A  NOTE  ON  ALCOVES 

It  is  surprising  what  protean  gifts  a 
theme  develops  once  you  attempt  to 
grapple  with  it.  When  I  was  asked  to 
set  down  on  paper  my  personal  no- 
tions as  to  The  Form  and  Scope  of  the 
Novel,  the  affair  seemed  simple.  But, 
with  the  task  actually  begun,  the  type- 
writer bell  may  hardly  tinkle  thrice 
before  one  sees  that  the  guide  to  fur- 
ther composition  must  be  the  once 
celebrated  chapter,  in  I  forget  whose 
Natural  History,  upon  the  snakes  of 
Iceland.  It  read,  as  you  recall,  "There 
are  no  snakes  in  Iceland."  For  one 
perceives  that  the  form  and  scope  of 
the  novel,  if  not  similarly  non-ex- 
istent, at  least  stay  indeterminable  in 
lands  wherein  the  form  and  the  scope 
of  prose  fiction  stay  limitless. 

The  sole  aim  of  the  written,  printed 
and  formally  labeled  novel  is,  I  take 
25 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

it,  to  divert.  Such  is  (one  may  assume 
with  in  any  event  quite  reputable 
backing)  the  only  aim  of  creative 
writing,  and  of  all  the  arts.  But  much 
the  same  sort  of  diversion  seems  to  be 
the  purpose  of  a  staggering  number  of 
human  endeavors :  and  it  is  when  one 
considers  the  novels  which  are  not 
formally  labeled,  that  the  theme  eva- 
sively assumes  all  manner  of  shapes, 
and  the  field  of  prose  fiction  is  re- 
vealed as  limitless. 

I  do  not  hunt  paradox.  I  but  wish 
in  real  sincerity  to  acknowledge  that 
our  trade  of  novel  writing  and  pub- 
lishing is  an  ineffably  minor  evince- 
ment  of  the  vast  and  pride-evoking 
truth,  that  human  beings  are  wiser 
than  reason.  Pure  reason — I  mean, 
as  pure  as  human  reason  assays — re- 
veals out  of  hand  that  the  main  course 
of  daily  living  is  part  boredom,  part 
active  discomfort  and  fret,  and,  for 
the  not  inconsiderable  rest,  a  blunder- 
ing adherence  to  some  standard  de- 
rived from  this  or  that  hearsay.  But 
26 


A  NOTE  ON  ALCOVES 

human  beings,  in  this  one  abnegation 
infinitely  wise,  liere  all  discard  the 
use  of  their  reasoning  powers,  which 
are  perhaps  felt  here  to  be  at  least  as 
gullible  as  usual:  and  brave  men 
cheerily  deny  their  immersion  in  the 
futile  muddle  through  which  they  toil 
lip-deep.  Pinned  to  the  wall,  the 
more  truthful  of  flesh  and  blood  may 
grant  that  this  current  afternoon  does, 
by  the  merest  coincidence,  prove  an- 
swerable to  some  such  morbid  and 
over-colored  description  by  people 
bent  on  being  "queer":  but  in  the  ad- 
mitter's  mind  forgetfulness  is  already 
about  its  charitable  censorship  of  the 
events  of  the  morning,  to  the  intent 
that  this  amended  account  be  placed 
on  file  with  many  expurgated  editions 
of  yesterday  and  the  most  brilliant 
romances  about  tomorrow.  For  hu- 
man memory  and  human  optimism 
are  adepts  at  the  prevarications  which 
everybody  grasps,  retails  and  tire- 
lessly reiterates;  these  two  it  is  who 
coin  the  fictions  which  every  person 
27 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

weaves  into  the  interminable  extrava- 
ganza that  he  recites  to  himself  as  an 
accurate  summing  up  of  his  own  past 
and  future;  and  everywhere  about 
this  earth's  revolving  surface  moves  a 
circulating  library  of  unwritten 
novels  bound  in  flesh  and  haber- 
dashery. 

Now  the  wholesome  effect  of  these 
novels  is  patent.  It  is  thanks  to  this 
brace  of  indefatigable  romancers  that 
nobody  really  needs  to  notice  how  the 
most  of  us,  in  unimportant  fact,  ap- 
proach toward  death  through  gray 
and  monotonous  corridors.  Besides, 
one  finds  a  number  of  colorful  alcoves 
here  and  there,  to  be  opened  by  in- 
toxication or  vcnery,  by  surrender  to 
the  invigorating  lunacy  of  herd  action, 
or  even  by  mental  concentration  upon 
new  dance-steps  and  the  problems  of 
auction  bridge.  One  blunders,  indeed, 
into  a  rather  handsome  number  of 
such  alcoves  which,  when  entered, 
temporarily  shut  out  the  rigidity  and 
the  only  exit  of  the  inescapable  cor- 
28 


A  NOTE  ON  ALCOVES 

ridor.  And  in  addition,  as  we  go,  all 
sorts  of  merry  tales  are  being  inter- 
changed about  what  lies  beyond  the 
nearing  door  and  the  undertaker's  lit- 
tle black  bag. 

These  are  not,  though,  the  only 
anesthetics.  The  human  maker  of 
fiction  furnishes  yet  other  alcoves, 
whether  with  beautiful  or  shocking 
ideas,  with  many  fancy-clutching  toys 
that  may  divert  the  traveler's  inind 
from  dwelling  on  the  tedium  of  his 
journey  and  the  ambiguity  of  its  end. 
I  have  not  yet,  of  course,  come  to  con- 
sideration of  the  formally  labeled 
novel,  for  this  much  is  true  of  every 
form  of  man-made  fiction,  whether  it 
be  concocted  by  poets  or  statesmen, 
by  bishops  in  conclave  or  by  adver- 
tisers in  the  back  of  magazines.  And 
since  memory  and  optimism,  as  has 
been  said,  are  the  archetypal  Homer 
and  St.  John,  the  supreme  and  most 
altruistic  of  all  deceivers,  the  omnipo- 
tent and  undying  masters  of  omni- 
present fictive  creation,  their  "meth- 
29 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

ods"  are  in  the  main  pursued  by  the 
great  pair's  epigoni;  who  Hkcwise 
tend  to  deal  with  the  large  deeds  of 
superhuman  persons  seen  through  a 
glow  of  amber  lucency,  not  wholly  un- 
akin  to  that  of  maple  syrup. 

Of  the  romances  which  make  for 
business  prosperity  and  religious  re- 
vivals and  wars  to  end  war  forever, 
here  is  no  call  to  speak.  Nor  need  I 
here  point  out  that  well-nigh  every 
one  who  anywhere  writes  prose  today, 
whether  it  takes  tlie  form  of  a  tax  re- 
turn, or  a  magazine  story,  or  a  letter 
beginning  "My  dear  So-and-So,"  is 
consciously  composing  fiction:  and  in 
the  spoken  prose  of  schoolrooms  and 
courts  of  law  and  social  converse,  I 
think,  no  candid  person  will  deny  that 
expediency  and  invention  collaborate. 
It  may  be  true  that  lies  have  short 
legs,  but  civilization  advances  upon 
them. 

So  do  we  all  exist,  as  if  in  a  warm 
grateful  bath,  submerged  and  soothed 
by  fiction.  In  contrast  to  the  inhabi- 
30 


A  NOTE  ON  ALCOVES 

tants  of  the  Scilly  Islands,  who  are  re- 
puted to  have  hved  by  taking  in  one 
another's  washing,  so  do  we  hve  by 
interchanging  tales  that  will  not  wash. 
There  seems  to  be  no  bound,  no  fron- 
tier trading-post,  appointed  anywhere 
to  this  barter  of  current  fiction,  not  in 
the  future  nor  in  the  years  behind. 
Men  have  been,  almost  cynically, 
shown  with  what  ease  the  romance 
which  we  call  history  may  be  recast 
throughout,  now  that  America  re- 
joices in  a  past  which  has  all  been 
painstakingly  rewritten  with  more 
care  of  the  King's  English,  and  where- 
in the  War  of  the  Revolution  takes  its 
proper  place  as  the  latest  addition  to 
the  list  of  German  outrages.  Our 
newspapers  continue  the  war-time 
economizing  of  intelligence,  and  still 
serve  patriotic  substitutes  in  serials, 
wherein  Red  and  Yellow  and  Black 
perils  keep  colorful  the  outlook,  and 
fiends  oppose  broad-minded  seraphim 
in  every  political  matter,  and  Messrs. 
Lenine  and  Trotsky  emulate  the 
31 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

apostle  by  dying  daily.  Our  clergy 
are  no  less  prolific  in  their  more  fu- 
turistic school  of  art,  and  on  every 
Sabbath  morning  discourse  engagingly 
of  paradise  and  of  that  millennium  of 
which  the  advent  is  somehow  being 
brought  nearer,  one  gathers,  by  the 
more  energetic  of  our  prelates  taking 
notes  and  whisky  in  the  larger  res- 
taurants. The  past,  the  present  and 
the  future  are  thus  everywhere  pre- 
sented in  the  terms  of  generally  pleas- 
ure-giving prose  fictions:  and  life  is 
rendered  passable  by  our  believing  in 
those  which  are  most  to  our  especial 
liking. 

Well,  it  is  the  task  of  the  novelist — I 
mean,  at  last,  the  novelist  who  is 
frankly  listed  as  such  in  Who's  Who 
— to  aid  according  to  his  abilities  in 
this  old  world-wide  effort,  so  to  de- 
lude mankind  that  nobody  from  birth 
to  death  need  ever  really  bother  about 
his,  upon  the  whole,  unpromising  sit- 
uation in  the  flesh.  It  is  the  sole  aim 
of  the  novelist,  alike  in  art  and  com- 
32 


A  NOTE  ON  ALCOVES 

merce,  to  divert  us  from  unprofitable 
and  rational  worrying,  to  head  yet 
one  more  desperate  sally  from  that 
ordered  living  and  the  selves  of  which 
we  are  tired. 

So  I  suspect  there  must  always  be, 
to  the  last  digit,  precisely  as  many 
"methods"  as  there  are  novelists.  For 
the  business  of  the  novelist  is  to  tell 
untruths  that  will  be  diverting :  and  of 
their  divertingness  he  can  have  no 
touchstone,  before  the  receipt  of  roy- 
alty statements,  save  only  the  re- 
sponse which  these  untruths  evoke 
from  him.  His  primary  endeavor 
must,  for  this  reason,  be  to  divert,  not 
any  possible  reader,  but  himself. 

Some  tale-tellers  find  themselves 
most  readily  bedrugged  by  yearning 
toward  loveliness  unknown  and  unat- 
tainable: these  are,  we  say,  our  ro- 
manticists. To  them  are,  technically, 
opposed  the  Pollyannas  among  fiction 
writers,  who  can  derive  a  sort  of  ob- 
scure esthetic  comfort  from  consid- 
ering persons  even  less  pleasantly  sit- 
33 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

uated  than  themselves — somewhat  as 
a  cabin  passenger  on  a  sinking  ship 
might  consider  the  poor  devils  in  the 
steerage — and  so  write  "realism."  But 
the  inspiring  principle  remains  un- 
changed: you  think  of  that  which  is 
above  or  below  you  in  order  to  avoid 
thinking  of  what  is  about  you.  So  it 
really  does  not  greatly  matter  whether 
you  travel  with  Marco  Polo  to  Cathay 
or  with  the  Kennicotts  to  Gopher 
Prairie.  The  excursion  may  be  for  the 
purpose  of  looking  at  beautiful  things 
wistfully  or  at  ugly  things  contemptu- 
ously :  the  point  is  that  it  is  an  excur- 
sion from  the  place  where  you  regard 
over-familiar  things  with  a  yawn. 

When  one  considers  these  truisms — 
and  fails  to  see  why  anybody  not  in 
the  act  of  writing  for  the  more  suc- 
cessful periodicals  need  dispute  them 
— the  form  and  scope  of  even  the  for- 
mally labeled  novel  seem  fluctuating 
and  indeterminable.  The  novelist,  it 
is  apparent,  will  write  in  the  form — 
with  such  dramatic,  epic  or  lyric  lean- 
34 


A  NOTE  ON  ALCOVES 

ings  as  his  taste  dictates — which  he 
personally  finds  alluring:  his  rhythms 
will  be  such  as  caress  his  personal 
pair  of  ears :  and  the  scope  of  his  writ- 
ing will  be  settled  solely  by  what  he 
personally  does  or  does  not  find  inter- 
esting. For  the  serious  prose  crafts- 
man will  write  primarily  to  divert 
himself — with  a  part  thrifty  but  in  the 
main  a  philanthropic  underthought  of 
handing  on,  at  a  fair  price,  the  play- 
things and  the  games  which  he  con- 
trives, for  the  diversion  of  those  with 
a  like  taste  in  anodynes.  And  to  do 
this  will  content  him.  For  he  will  be- 
lieve that  he  may  win  to  fame  by 
brewing  oblivion,  he  will  hope  to  in- 
vent, if  he  be  very  lucky,  some  quite 
new  form  of  "let's  pretend."  But  he 
will  not  believe  that  anybody  with  a 
valid  claim  to  be  considered  a  post- 
graduate child  can  gravely  talk  about 
affixing  limits  to  the  form  and  scope 
of  that  especial  pastime. 


THE  DIFFERENCE  BETWEEN  LIFE 
AND  FICTION 

Floyd  Dell 


IV 


THE  DIFFERENCE  BETWEEN  LIFE 
AND  FICTION 

It  seems  to  me  that  fiction,  in  what- 
ever stage  of  development,  still  re- 
tains the  purpose  of  the  fairy-tale. 
But  the  fairy-tale,  contrary  to  what 
many  people  suppose,  has  a  very  seri- 
ous purpose.  We  come  into  the  world 
equipped  with  a  capacity  of  varied 
emotional  response  to  our  environ- 
ment. That  environment,  even  in  its 
simplest  terms,  the  home  and  family, 
presents  itself  to  our  childish  intelli- 
gence as  a  mysterious  chaos  of  facts; 
and  the  greater  world  outside  this  lit- 
tle world  seems,  as  we  come  in  contact 
with  it,  more  chaotic  and  mysterious 
still.  In  the  task  of  growing  up,  it  is 
necessary  for  our  emotional  responses 
to  this  chaotic  world  to  be  coor- 
dinated; we  must  deal  with  this  huge 
world  quite  as  if  we  understood  what 
39 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

it  was  really  like.  So  that  from  the: 
first  a  process  of  education  goes  on 
which  undertakes  to  tell  us — not  so 
much  what  the  world  is  really  like,  for 
that  would  only  be  to  make  confusion 
worse  confounded — but  a  notion  of  it 
which  will  arrange  our  impulses  to- 
ward it  into  some  kind  of  order. 
"What  is  required — for  we  have  as 
children  a  wealth  of  emotions  and  lit- 
tle experience — is  an  emotionally  in- 
telligible interpretation  of  the  world. 
The  most  preposterous  fairy-tale,  if  it 
is  a  good  faii'j'^-tale — if  it  is  in  any 
sense  a  work  of  art,  and  arranges 
the  emotions  with  which  it  so  fan- 
tastically deals  into  some  kind  of 
rhj^thmic  pattern — tells  us  more  about 
friendship,  love,  ambition,  folly  and 
heroism,  and  their  significance  to  our- 
selves,— than  we  knew  before.  So 
that  it  is,  essentially,  a  kind  of  simple 
pragmatic  truth  that  is  aimed  at  in  the 
fairy-talc.  We  can  not  learn  life  by 
living  it — we  must  have  some  kind  of 
notion  about  it  to  enable  us  to  digest 
40 


LIFE  AND  FICTION 

our  experiences  as  we  get  them.  And 
of  all  kinds  of  teachings,  that  which 
comes  to  us  through  our  emotional 
perceptions  is  the  most  fundamental, 
precisely  because  it  is  the  most 
effective. 

But  the  pragmatic  truth  of  these 
simple  works  of  art  is  different  from 
plain  factual  truth,  and  in  a  sense  an 
opposite  of  it,  in  so  far  as  factual  truth 
remains,  for  all  our  efforts  to  under- 
stand and  arrange  it,  chaotic.  Under- 
neath all  the  picturesque  disorder  of 
the  fairy-tale,  there  are  the  outlines  of 
a  very  simple  and  orderly  world. 

And  the  same,  I  think,  is  true  of  the 
adult  novel.  Our  experience  has  by 
this  time  been  enlarged,  so  that  we  de- 
light in  a  picture  of  life,  let  us  say,  in 
terms  of  jobs,  wages,  politics,  and 
erotic  misadventures,  rather  than  in 
one  in  terms  of  quests,  treasures,  talk- 
ing bushes  and  dragons.  But  under- 
neath these  recognizable  incidents  of 
our  chaotic  daily  lives  there  must  be 
the  outlines  of  a  simple  and  orderly 
41 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

world — a  world  more  simple  and  or- 
derly than  the  unfathomable  nature 
of  life's  mj^steries — but  emotionally 
we  require  the  satisfaction  which  only 
simple  certainties  can  bring.  For  we 
still,  as  adults,  read  novels  for  the 
same  unconscious  and  serious  pur- 
pose with  which  we  read  fairy-tales  as 
children.  We  want  to  know  more 
about  our  relation  to  the  world.  But 
we  emphatically  do  not  want  the  raw 
material  of  life;  we  want  life  made 
emotionally  intelligible — and  that  can 
only  be  effected  by  a  process  of  sim- 
plification and  arrangement  which  a 
hostile  observer,  indifferent  to  these 
purposes,  might  call  suppression,  or 
censorship,  or  lying. 

Even  so,  the  fable  serves  the  pur- 
pose which  the  mere  facts  fail  to  serve. 
I  have  read  in  my  life  only  one  book 
which  was,  in  my  opinion,  measurably 
true  to  the  more  common  facts  which 
constitute  ordinary  life.  That  book — 
and  I  recommend  it  to  the  curious 
reader  as  a  perfect  illustration  of  the 
42 


LIFE  AND  FICTION 

difference  between  artistic  truth  and 
truth  to  facts — is  One  Man,  by  Robert 
Steele.  Since  I  have  inentioned  it,  I 
suppose  I  sliould  add  that  its  truth  to 
the  facts  of  ordinary  life  does  not  con- 
sist in  the  specific  nature  of  the 
crimes,  misdemeanors  and  follies 
there  related — but  rather  in  the  irrele- 
vance to  each  other  of  the  emotional 
states  which  it  records.  There  are  in 
this  book  episodes — dozens  of  them — 
which  would  have  served  Dostoievsky 
for  a  climax.  But,  as  here  presented, 
they  have  no  emotional  validity  what- 
ever, because  they  have  no  relation  to 
what  comes  before  and  after.  Judged 
as  a  work  of  art,  the  book  is  prepos- 
terous and  trivial.  Its  sole  signifi- 
cance is  as  a  document  showing  what 
human  life,  before  it  has  been  sub- 
jected to  the  processes  of  art,  is  like. 
Ordinary  people  are  not  so  "bad"  as 
the  hero  of  this  book;  but  they  are,  I 
think,  quite  as  absurd  and  contradic- 
tory. The  true-to-facts  story  of  any 
one  I  know  would  make  a  document 
43 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

equally  inchoate  and  meaningless 
with  this,  if  perhaps  a  little  less  sensa- 
tional. And  it  is  because  human  life 
in  the  raw  is  like  this,  that  human  be- 
ings need  and  desire  those  simplifi- 
cations, those  interpretations,  which 
by  suppressing,  altering,  rearranging 
the  facts,  permit  what  is  left  to  have 
some  emotional  meaning. 

No  one,  I  think,  who  has  any  very 
acute  sense  of  the  variety  and 
jumbled  irrelevance  of  the  facts  of 
life  as  they  present  themselves  to  us 
in  ordinary  human  experience  would 
either  imagine  that  the  literal  record 
of  these  facts  constituted  a  story,  or  be 
so  ambitious  as  to  attempt  to  frame 
them  all  into  an  intelligible  emotional 
sequence.  Yet  this — cither  or  both — is 
what  the  writers  of  "realistic"  fiction 
are  currently  and  disapprovingly  said 
to  be  doing  by  many  American  critics. 
There  is  supposed  to  be  a  "school"  of 
writers  whose  theory  of  fiction  is  to 
put  down  everything  "just  as  it  hap- 
pens in  real  life."  There  are  gloomy 
44 


LIFE  AND  FICTION 

forebodings  of  the  death  of  the  art  of 
fiction  under  the  assaults  of  the  "lit- 
eral chroniclers  of  life."  These  fears 
are  quite  unnecessary,  and  the  lovers 
of  romance  can  take  heart.  Not 
Theodore  Dreiser  in  his  inost  zealous 
realistic  mood  ever  undertook  to  set 
down  more  than  the  limited  and  par- 
ticular selection  of  facts  which  he 
deemed  necessary  to  convey  the  qual- 
ity of  his  emotion. 

There  is,  I  think,  no  quarrel  be- 
tween romance  and  realism.  The  se- 
lection of  facts  is  more  rigorous  and 
more  conventional  in  romantic  fic- 
tion, more  generous  and  more  adven- 
turous in  realistic  fiction.  I  can  not 
even  assert,  as  a  writer  of  fiction  that 
has  been  very  flatteringly  called  real- 
istic, that  realism  aims  more  ardently 
than  romance  at  truth.  It  does  seem 
to  me  to  have  the  merit,  whatever  that 
may  count  for,  of  being  more  inti- 
mately recognizable  as  a  vehicle  of 
truth  by  those  whose  experiences  af- 
ford them  the  opportunity  of  testing 
45 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

in  their  own  minds  the  literalness  of 
the  accounts  by  which  that  truth  is 
sought  to  be  conveyed.  The  literal 
truthfulness  of  Sinclair  Lewis's  ac- 
count of  a  day-coach  in  the  Middle 
West  may  not  imply  an  imaginative 
insight  into  the  souls  of  its  passengers; 
but  there  is  no  doubt  that  it  puts  many 
of  us  into  a  receptive  frame  of  mind 
toward  emotional  conclusions  about 
middle-western  souls  which  we  might 
otherwise  be  disposed  to  reject  as  too 
painful.  The  function  of  literalness 
in  factual  detail  would  seem,  in  fic- 
tion, to  be  much  the  same  as  it  is  in 
the  court-room — to  make  it  harder  to 
escape  the  obligation  of  feeling  "un- 
pleasant" emotions.  The  author's 
motive  is  plain :  he  has  these  emotions, 
and  he  wishes  to  lessen  the  burden  of 
them  by  sharing  them  with  others. 
And  the  reason  wliy  realism  is  so  often 
of  tliis  "unpleasant"  character,  is  sim- 
ply that  happy  emotions  need  no  such 
elaborate  reinforcement.  We  do  not 
need  to  have  it  proved  that  the  liero 
46 


LIFE  AND  FICTION 

and  heroine  lived  happily  ever  after; 
the  assertion  suffices.  It  is  when  they 
did  not  live  happily  ever  after  that 
many  painful — and  intimately  recog- 
nizable— details  are  needed  to  per- 
suade us  to  believe  that  so  it  hap- 
pened. But  if  we  read  these  realistic 
accounts  of  our  human  misadven- 
tures, it  is  not  because  the  manner  of 
the  telling  has  a  virtue  of  its  own,  but 
because  we  desire  to  enlarge  our  con- 
ception of  our  lives  so  as  to  bring 
these  difficult  and  painful  facts  also 
to  some  emotionally  intelligible  rela- 
tionship with  the  rest  of  our  experi- 
ence. 

And  if  any  of  the  new  kinds  of  sci- 
entific knowledge,  such  for  example 
as  psycho-analysis,  are  to  be  of  use  to 
the  novelist,  it  must  be,  I  think,  not  by 
virtue  of  any  magic  of  "truth"  which 
they  contain,  and  certainly  not  by 
bringing  new  facts  within  the  scope  of 
the  novelist's  interest,  but  rather  be- 
cause they  may  possibly  simplify  his 
task  of  selection  and  arrangement — • 
47 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

because  they  give  him  certain  concep- 
tions of  life  as  emotionally  intelligible 
and  possibly  as  fundamentally  ap- 
pealing as  the  oldest  fairy-tale. 


THE  MAJOR  ISSUE 

by 
Waldo  Frank 


THE  MAJOR  ISSUE 

To  the  incidental  character  of  the 
novel  as  a  reflection  of  life  we  give 
great  care;  to  its  essential  nature  as  a 
contribution  to  life  v^e  bring  ignorance 
and  neglect. 

How  would  we  regard  the  critic 
who  judged  El  Greco,  Rembrandt,  the 
African  woodcarver  by  their  conform- 
ance with  a  set  of  rules  of  anatomy 
and  geometry  text-books?  Would  we 
not  say:  the  artist  who  creates  by 
means  of  physical  forms  needs  knowl- 
edge of  physical  laws,  knowledge  of 
physical  structure.  For  it  is  of  these 
materials  that  he  articulates  his  vision 
and  his  form.  But  he  is  an  artist  inso- 
far as  he  has  a  vision  and  a  form.  His 
knowledge  of  muscles,  torsos,  limbs, 
of  spatial  quantities  is  his  knowledge 
of  means.  If  we  wish  to  know  en- 
51 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

dogenously  about  muscles,  torsos, 
limbs,  we  do  not  go  to  the  artist  .  .  . 
although  we  may  go  to  men  who  have 
learned  vastly  from  artists.  And  if  we 
wish  to  understand  intelligently  the 
particular  use  which  the  particular 
artist  makes  of  such  matters,  we  must 
learn  first  what  the  artist  wants  to  say 
and  determine  by  that  measure  if  he 
has  used  them  well. 

The  novelist's  need  of  individual 
and  social  psychologj^  is  a  pretty  good 
analogue  to  the  plastic  artist's  need  of 
physical  forms;  the  novelist's  use  of 
customs,  manners,  institutions,  creeds, 
is  kin  to  the  plastic  artist's  use  of  the 
ways  of  mass  and  space.  How  comes 
it  then  that  we  think  we  have  struck 
to  the  heart  of  the  nature  and  reason 
of  a  novel  when  we  discuss  its  psycho- 
logical correctness,  (its  verisimilitude 
with  our  own  idea  of  certain  men  and 
women)  or  its  awareness  of  certain 
social  problems? 

Of  course,  there  is  reason  for  this, 
but  it  is  not  as  some  of  us  doubtless 
would  be  pleased  to  have  it,  that  this 
52 


THE  MAJOR  ISSUE 

is  a  "scientific  age."  "Even  in  our  fic- 
tion," to  quote  the  imaginary  profes- 
sor, "we  look  for  serious  discussion  of 
fact  and  of  truth."  To  whom  I  make 
reply:  "In  your  fiction,  you  look  for 
corroborating  statements  of  your  own 
particular  brands  of  fact  and  truth — ■ 
brands  put  up  from  previous  creative 
contributions:  which  is  quite  another 
matter."  It  is  not  scientific  nor  con- 
ducive to  the  advantage  of  science,  to 
judge  a  novel  in  terms  let  us  say  of  its 
"psychological  accuracy"  or  of  its 
"faithful  reflection  of  social  reality." 
For  to  do  this  is  to  accept  as  an  Abso- 
lute Measure  of  accuracy  and  faithful- 
ness the  rationalized  data  of  previous 
creators  or  groups  of  creators;  and 
thereby  to  hinder  the  continuity  of 
man's  contribution  to  reality  of  ex- 
perience which  is,  from  the  scientific 
standpoint,  part  of  the  function  of  cre- 
ative art.  Here  as  elsewhere  the  gap 
between  science  and  art  is  truly  the 
gap  between  false  science  and  bad  art. 
To  be  scientific  about  art  is  to  be  es- 
thetic about  it. 

52 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

Nor  is  it  necessary  to  go  back  to 
Aristotle.  Enough,  as  regards  that 
very  great  man's  Esthetic,  to  say  that 
his  meaning  in  the  phrase  "Imitation 
of  nature"  was  determined  by  a  posi- 
tive and  common  animistic  under- 
standing of  nature  which  included 
primarily  the  dynamic  principle  of 
the  individual  will  and  which  most  of 
us  moderns  lack :  and  that  it  was  lim- 
ited by  an  ignorance  of  the  processes 
of  the  human  Psyche  which  was  ex- 
cusable in  Aristotle  but  is  less  excus- 
able in  Mr.  Babbitt.  .  .  . 

Let  us  skip  to  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury. German  Romanticism  and 
French  Romanticism,  by  respective 
metaphysical  and  esthetic  methods, 
brought  new  sentient  worlds  to  the  use 
of  the  evolving  will  of  Europe.  The 
hierarchic  stuffs  so  satisfactory  to 
Shakespeare,  Montaigne,  Racine,  no 
longer  served  the  creator.  So  Roman- 
ticism ordered  Receptivity  to  Material. 
All  fields,  all  worlds,  all  "realities"  .  . . 
from  the  innermost  ego  to  the  farther- 
54 


THE  MAJOR  ISSUE 

most  sea  .  .  .  became  the  stuff  of  ex- 
pression. Despite  the  complexity  of 
this  and  the  intricate  relation  of  the 
artist  and  the  group,  one  can  say  di- 
rectly enough  that  to  the  novelist  this 
meant  a  simple  thing :  here  once  more 
was  adequate  material  whereby  he 
could  express  himself.  The  creator 
was  as  ever  active  and  dynamic.  The 
material,  at  least  in  the  ultimate  pro- 
cess toward  art,  was  fuel,  symbol, 
means — anything  but  end.  Now,  after 
the  creative  act,  came  the  Program. 
Balzac  assured  us  that  he  was  Secre- 
tary to  Society.  Flaubert  vowed  that 
from  his  works  the  least  personal 
taint  had  been  excised.  Zola  and  the 
Goncourt  brothers  discoursed  on  Dar- 
win whom  they  never  understood  and 
framed  the  Naturalist  novel  which 
they  never  wrote.  For  Balzac  was  the 
opposite  of  social  secretary:  he  was 
the  creator  of  dense  organic  forms  to 
the  making  of  which  he  kneaded  the 
"life"  of  France  as  the  baker  kneads 
flour.  Flaubert,  as  weak  an  analyst 
55 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

as  ever  gained  fame  for  being  a  great 
one,  was  a  pure  and  powerful  intuitif : 
he  was  a  true  progenitor  of  imagism 
and  of  cubism :  he  made  of  Emma  Bo- 
vary,  Salammbo,  Saint  Anthony  and 
Frederic  Moreau  successive  cxpres- 
sionistic  forms  of  his  own  uncomfort- 
able state  in  France.  Only  the  disciples 
of  Zola,  whose  names  we  forget, 
wrote  Naturalist  novels  according 
to  the  program.  And  the  trouble  with 
them  lay  not  with  a  program  good  or 
bad:  it  lay  with  their  own  lack  of  cre- 
ative power. 

Now,  during  the  propaganda  pe- 
riods of  Romanticism,  when  receptiv- 
ity  to  fresh  material  was  a  point  to  be 
fought  for,  the  terms  realist  and 
naturalist  as  indicating  acceptance  of 
the  romantic  attitude  had  meaning. 
The  fresh  material  of  the  romanticist 
became  the  reality  of  the  realist.  The 
realists,  later  the  naturalists,  were 
they  who  espoused  and  practised  the 
romanticist  esthetic.  Correctly,  there- 
fore, realist  and  romanticist  were 
56 


THE  MAJOR  ISSUE 

one:  and  during  the  romanticist  pe- 
riod alone  did  the  word  reahsm,  ap- 
plied to  the  novel,  have  sense  as  a  de- 
fining term.  Moreover,  in  those  rare 
cases  where  the  romanticist  will  for 
new-worlds-to-conquer  begot  the  fi- 
nality of  a  new-conquered-world  (a 
true  work  of  art),  the  romanticist- 
realist  ended  in  classicism.  His  work 
was  classic.  The  whole  lot  of  oppo- 
nent terms  equated  into  zero. 

Never  are  these  terms  with  their 
old  connotations  heard  today  in 
France  and  Germany  where  they  were 
born.  They  are  still  with  us,  where 
they  are  merely  borrowed.  Outside 
of  this  technical  and  relative  meaning 
about  which  most  of  us  are  as  igno- 
rant as  we  are  of  the  esthetic  school  of 
Egypt,  realism  as  referred  to  art  and 
the  novel  is  as  senseless  a  term  as  has 
ever  been  picked  up  from  a  junkshop. 
Every  artist  that  has  lived  in  the 
world  is  a  realist  insofar  as  himself  is 
real  and  as  his  material,  determined 
by  himself  and  the  world,  must  be  real 
57 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

also.  But  no  artist  conceivable  to 
man  can  be  a  realist  in  the  sense  of 
our  critical  implication — the  sense  of 
an  absolute  reality  which  true  scien- 
tists would  not  arrogate  to  mathe- 
matics and  certainly  not  to  man.  "It 
is  the  highest  glory  of  man,"  said 
Remy  de  Gourmont,  "that  there  is  no 
science  of  man."  Our  standard  of 
reality  is  an  accumulating,  gyrating 
and  disappearing  flux  of  subjective 
contributions.  If  there  is  a  science  of 
man,  its  name  is  esthetics,  and  its 
axiom:  that  each  new  contribution 
shall  be  gauged  by  the  inner  law  of  its 
own  genesis.  And  here  is  an  axiom 
that  does  away  with  ninety-nine  one- 
hundredths  of  our  "intelligent  com- 
ment" on  novels  that  create  char- 
acters and  discuss  conditions  "true  to 
life." 

What  happens  to  us  is  simple.  Re- 
ceptivity to  material  was  a  means  for 
the  creation  of  the  nineteenth  century 
Epic — an  Epic  which  I  am  convinced 
is  still  in  the  pre-Homeric  stage.  That 
58 


THE  MAJOR  ISSUE 

receptivity  we  have  made  into  an  End. 
The  Continental  Europeans  are  inde- 
fatigable program-makers.  They 
made  a  program  of  the  liberating  pro- 
cess of  the  nineteenth  century  novel. 
We  use  that  program  like  pedantic 
children  to  measure  our  own  works 
and  give  them  meaning:  with  the  re- 
sult that  we  rob  them  of  what  mean- 
ing they  have.  Meantime  in  Europe, 
they  have  twentieth  century  novels — ■ 
and  twentieth  century  programs 
whereby  to  gauge  them. 

Program-making  is  a  vital  part  of 
the  process  whereby  the  social  body 
more  or  less  assimilates  those  new  ex- 
periences and  forms  of  life  which  are 
literature  and  art.  But  program-mak- 
ing must  start  from  a  recognition  of 
the  extra-intellectual  nature  of  crea- 
tion. The  intellect  does  not  create,  it 
measures  and  brings  up  what  it  appre- 
hends. The  value  of  imaginative  liter- 
ature, even  pragmatically  as  nourish- 
ment to  life,  lies  in  the  fact  that  it 
creates  what  the  intellect — theory, 
59 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

program,  a  priori  standards  of  good, 
bad,  right  and  wrong — does  not  as  yet 
possess.  For  the  intellect  possesses 
what  was  created  before.  Hence  con- 
temporary art  can  never  fall  within  the 
scope  of  pre-existing  programs.  And 
to  judge  the  novel — its  value  as  a  con- 
tribution to  literature  and  life — on  the 
basis  of  any  given  psychological  or 
documentary  measure  of  fact,  truth, 
reality  and  the  like,  is  irrelevant  and 
absurd. 

This  formulated  problem  of  scope 
and  theory  concerns  the  novelist  only 
indirectly;  only  insofar  as  he  is  af- 
fected by  the  critic  who,  rationalizing 
his  work  on  the  basis  of  the  work  it- 
self or  on  the  basis  of  some  forebear's 
work,  either  aids  or  clogs  the  process 
of  assimilating  the  novelist's  contribu- 
tion to  the  sum  of  social  experience. 
Let  the  novelist  think  that  he  is  pri- 
marily concerned  with  socialism, 
housing  problems,  psycho-analysis 
and  the  like.  If  he  is  an  artist,  his 
thinking  will  be  but  a  detail  of  his 
60 


THE  MAJOR  ISSUE 

work;  and  if  he  is  not  an  artist  his 
work  will  be  but  a  negligible  detail  of 
his  thinking.  "From  the  beginning  to 
the  end,"  wrote  Cervantes,  "Don  Qui- 
xote is  an  attack  on  the  romances  of 
chivalry."  With  this  mouse  of  a  pro- 
gram he  produced  his  mountain  of  an 
epic,  because  he  was  a  mountain — a 
veritable  sea  and  mountain — of  a 
man.  The  esthetic  value  of  any 
novel  is  the  end-product  of  its  related 
elements  of  life.  The  novelist  who 
deals  with,  and  relates  into  organic 
form,  elements  of  life,  with  whatever 
intellectual  conviction,  may  create 
Beauty  if  he  has  that  virtue  in  him. 
But  the  novelist  who  tries  to  deal  di- 
rectly with  Beauty,  get  at  it  directly, 
short-cutting  the  elements  of  life,  is 
doomed.  The  artist  in  the  act  of  crea- 
tion can  afford  to  be  anything  rather 
than  an  esthete. 

But   the  critic   and   the  public — let 

them  look  to  their  ways!     Let  them 

cease  from  studying  a  means  as  the 

end.    Let  them  cease  from  parroting 

61 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

decayed  programs.  Let  them  not 
think  that  they  have  dealt  with  a  novel 
.  .  .  however  much  they  praise  it  .  .  . 
when  they  have  discussed  its  "psy- 
chology" and  its  "documentarj'^  mate- 
rial." (The  term  "psychological  novel'* 
has  less  meaning  than  the  term  "phys- 
iological oil-painting.") 

We  have  a  few  true  creators,  cap- 
turers  of  organic  form — which  is  an- 
other term  for  life — from  the  hinter- 
lands at  which  mankind  rekindles  its 
fires  and  forges  its  tomorrows.  And 
w^e  have  the  perennial  Mass — passive, 
indolent,  like  a  woman  fond  of  reflec- 
tions, hostile  to  all  contributions,  since 
they  mean  renewal,  effort,  change. 
Which  will  the  American  critic  serve : 
the  dross  of  the  Mass  which  is  the 
Mass  itself,  or  the  spirit  of  the  Mass 
which  is  the  artist? 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 
Zona  Gale 


yi 

THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

Already  we  have  mosaics  of  beauty 
in  the  American  novel.  But  it  lacks 
organic  beauty. 

In  the  modern  novels  of  England 
the  high  example  of  organic  beauty 
seems  to  be  the  work  of  Hudson.  No 
one  knows  what  he  does;  but  his  touch 
unseals  an  essence. 

In  the  American  novel  we  have 
nothing  approaching  this  essence. 
One  is  grateful,  in  these  days  of  the 
triumphant  discovery  of  the  common- 
place, for  mere  beautiful  mosaics. 
But  these  have  little  to  do  with  the 
basic  beauty,  the  organic  beauty 
which  a  novel  must  breathe  before  it 
can  approximate  its  potential  scope 
and  function. 

Now  organic  beauty  in  any  art  must 
be  compact  of  beauty  not  already 
familiar  to  us.  Familiar  beauty  can 
65 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

give  us  the  mosaics.  But  it  is  strange- 
ness in  beauty  which  alone  can  weave 
the  spell  and  bear  the  perfume.  This 
is  not  to  say  unreality;  but  on  the  con- 
trary a  deeper  reality  than  we  are  ac- 
customed to  divine.  The  reality  of  lit- 
eral levels  of  perception  to  which  we 
do  not  ordinarily  penetrate  or  of 
which,  rather,  we  are  not  often  con- 
scious as  they  penetrate  our  own 
plane.  Professor  Eucken's  claim  that 
the  spiritual  world  is  "an  independent 
reality,  waiting  to  be  apprehended, 
waiting  to  be  incorporated  into  our 
universe"  is  enormously  served  by  art 
whose  functioning  is  so  largely  in  ex- 
tensions of  the  ordinaiy  faculties. 
Between  the  naturalistic  novel,  which 
is  a  record,  and  the  romantic  novel, 
which  is  the  product  of  human  imag- 
ining, lies  this  other  novel,  the  novel 
of  tomorrow,  concerned  with  immi- 
nent yet  almost  undivined  reality  of 
human  conduct,  human  dream,  per- 
ceived "for  their  own  sakes,  with  the 
eyes  of  disinterested  love." 
66 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

Our  failure  may  lie  in  the  fact  that 
such  beauty  as  our  novels  have  is 
chiefly  concerned  with  moral  idealism 
and  romantic  love,  as  we  know  them 
now.  Our  moral  idealism  is  still  in- 
tent on  the  esoteric  with — shall  we 
say? — either  simple  standards  w^hich 
ought  long  ago  to  have  been  taken  for 
granted  or  conventionalized  stand- 
ards having  no  correspondence  with 
the  mystery  of  conduct.  Therefore 
our  novels  devote  themselves  to,  say, 
one  emerging  from  a  crude  upbring- 
ing to  the  point  of  being  hounded  by 
her  "furies"  to  escape  tawdriness.  Or 
even  with  those  records  of  Henry 
James,  that — Conrad  calls  him — that 
"historian  of  the  individual  con- 
science, of  adventure  in  which  only 
choice  souls  are  involved" — crucial  in- 
stances, always  suffused  with  a  cer- 
tain beauty,  but  always  the  beauty  of 
the  individual  conscience  in  known 
areas.  Moral  beauty  rather  than  eso- 
teric beauty.  And  as  for  the  treatment 
in  novels  of  romantic  love,  that  is  al- 
67 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

ways  a  matter  of  bright  feathers,  of 
the  pas  de  seal  before  the  cave  door, 
our  only  advance  from  that  cave  door 
courting  being  that  there  are  antiph- 
onal  feathers  and  dancing  instead 
of  mascuHne  antics  alone.  In  spite  of 
the  fact  that  there  is,  both  in  idealism 
and  in  love,  something  not  ourselves 
which  is  the  glory  of  the  experience, 
still  the  novel  continues  to  treat  only 
of  measurable  reactions,  rarely  call- 
ing down  the  utter  sunlit  areas  where 
every  human  soul  docs  sometime  en- 
ter. Now  these  sunlit  areas  are  a  part 
of  life,  of  reality.  If  they  can  be  ex- 
perienced, they  can  be  incarnated  in 
the  novel.  And  it  is  these  sunlit 
spaces  of  discernible  reality  which 
alone  can  give  to  the  novel  a  basis  of 
beauty. 

Moreover  these  reaches  are  not 
merely  extensions  of  moral  idealism 
or  of  romantic  love.  Neither  the  one 
nor  the  other  may  be  of  dominating 
concern  there,  save  in  some  form  so 
heightened  that  it  has  passed  into 
68 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

pure  beauty.  Nor  are  these  areas  re- 
mote ;  it  is  their  power  that  they  inter- 
penetrate the  homeliest  lives  and  the 
most  ordinary  surroundings.  This  is 
a  point  which  the  worshipper  of  mo- 
saics of  beauty  will  not  readily  admit 
and  perhaps  he  is  right  about  his  mo- 
saics. But  organic  beauty  is  every- 
where at  home. 

The  function  of  the  novel  is  not  to 
treat  of  life  as  it  appears  to  the  ordi- 
nary eye;  or  even  to  treat  life  in  its 
ordinary  aspect  if  that  were  ascertain- 
able. It  is  not  even  to  treat  of  life  as 
it  should  be,  if  that  were  ascertain- 
able. Its  function  is  not  primarily  to 
report  the  familiar  at  all.  The  func- 
tion of  the  novel  is  to  reflect  the 
familiar  as  permeated  by  the  unfamil- 
iar; to  reflect  the  unknown  in  its  daily 
office  of  permeating  the  known. 

Thus  the  novelist  is  to  go  not  only 
"joying  in  his  visible  universe"  but  in 
that  universe  by  which  his  own  is  in- 
terpenetrated. That  universe  invis- 
ible save  as  music  or  color  or  the  word 
69 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

or  some  other  high  manifestation 
causes  it  to  flower  in  human  experi- 
ence. 

It  is  this  high  manifestation  of  the 
word  which  Hudson  makes.  He 
causes  unfamihar  verities  to  enter  our 
ken  as  verities.  For  the  poetic  mind, 
the  mind  then  of  the  noveHst  at  his 
best,  is  the  perceiver  of  the  real  curve 
of  life,  the  knower  of  something  at 
least  of  its  inner  ecstasy. 

.  .  .  How  shall  this  interpretation 
best  be  made?  This  accomplishment 
concerns  the  form  of  the  novel. 

However  extreme  has  been  the 
modern  novel  in  stressing  the  com- 
monplace, it  has  developed  a  form 
suitable  for  the  expression  of  reality. 
Any  reality,  commonplace  or  not. 
This  form  is  direct,  unrcflective,  high- 
ly selective.  It  is  in  immediate  con- 
tact with  its  material.  It  is  uncom- 
promising, tactless,  unashamed.  And 
its  style  is  as  bare  and  clear  as  a  plain. 

It  may  be  that  the  whole  flair  for 
the  commonplace  will  be  found  to 
70 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

have  contributed  chiefly  to  the  forma- 
tion of  a  new  purity  of  form.  The 
treatment  of  the  commonplace  calls 
for  stark  precision  and  the  novel  has 
learned  something  of  stark  precision 
through  treating  the  commonplace. 
If  the  novel  had  continued  to  treat  of 
"the  good,  the  true  and  the  beautiful" 
it  might  be,  with  the  redundance  of 
that  phrase  itself,  laboring  on  in  a 
fringed  and  silken  fashion,  tasseled, 
plumed,  melancholy. 

When  the  novel  can  take  that  form 
■ — that  naked  and  lovely  instrument — ■ 
and  that  stark  style,  and  cause  them 
to  function  in  the  expression  of  name- 
less beauty,  such  as  Hudson  summons, 
it  will  have  sounded  the  new  note,  the 
note  of  the  novel  of  tomorrow.  And 
this  will  be  a  note  of  romanticism,  but 
not  of  romanticism  as  we  have  ever 
known  it. 

Ten  years  ago  a  wise  man  said: 
Free  verse  is  all  well  enough.  It  is 
now  a  vehicle  for  many  who  otherwise 
would  have  no  vehicle.  But  wait  until 
the  poets  begin  to  use  it.  Then! 
71 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

So  it  is  of  the  terse,  the  staccato,  the 
compact,  the  shorn  form  and  style  of 
the  modern  American  novel.  Height- 
en its  compactness,  take  from  it  cer- 
tain affectations  such  as  dclihcrate 
sordidness,  saturate  it  with  all  that 
divination  can  capture  of  communi- 
cable beauty.     "Then!" 

To  use  his  divination  to  clarify  the 
interpenetrating  beauty  of  common 
life  and  to  draw  down  still  other 
beauty;  not  to  manufacture  it  from 
unreality  but  to  discern  it  in  Reality 
and  to  reflect  it;  and  then  to  pour  this 
beauty  through  the  clear  crystal  of  a 
form  as  honest  as  a  milk  bottle — there 
lies  the  novelist's  lovely,  his  impera- 
tive task. 

But  this  he  will  never  do  if  he  is 
working  with  his  mind  alone.  Only 
when  he  knows  that  his  divination  of 
beauty,  of  all  life  is  "an  independent 
growth  which  he  himself  tends  and 
watches"  will  be  incarnate  in  the 
novel  the  vast  and  lovely  proportion 
of  the  days. 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  NOVELIST 
by 


VII 
THE  PROFESSION  OF  NOVELIST 

In  view  of  the  many  generalizations 
now  circulating  about  literature  in  the 
United  States,  it  might  be  interesting, 
or  even  instructive,  to  examine  the 
specific  case  of  a  relatively  young  man 
with  a  published  novel  of  authentic 
value.  It  is  necessary,  for  this  pur- 
pose, to  limit  the  investigation  to  a  be- 
ginning writer,  in  fact,  to  a  first  novel. 
Its  purpose  will  be  to  discover  exactly 
the  conditions  which  here  await  a 
fresh  and  actual  literature. 

It  is,  almost  invariably,  character- 
istic of  a  novelist  of  value  that  he 
should  not,  initially,  be  situated  in  a 
material  ease.  Young  men  with 
money,  and  post-graduate  honors,  do 
not  commonly  turn  to  the  novel,  but 
to  criticism  and  poetry.  Young  men 
who  make  their  bow  in  the  better 
known  magazines  hardly  ever  write 
75 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

novels — worth  a  thought  at  all.  Those 
who  do,  surprisingly,  write  good 
books  produce  them  in  hours  taken 
from  widely  other  necessary  tasks;  or 
in  times  of  sickness  and  forced  idle- 
ness. Such  an  individual,  pouring 
into  his  pages  everything,  elsewhere 
suppressed,  that  he  integrally  is,  fi- 
nally has  a  manuscript  put  together 
and  typewritten  with  an  infinite  pains 
and  an  immeasurable  difficulty;  it  is 
posted  or  carried  to  a  publisher;  and, 
after  a  space  of  something  like  six 
weeks,  he  has  a — for  him — stupen- 
dous letter  of  acceptance. 

This  novel,  which  we  are  under- 
standing as  thoroughly  worth  doing, 
will,  of  course,  be  different  from  the 
flood  of  readily  marketable  fictions; 
it  will  probably  be  tragic,  or,  at  the 
least,  satirical,  in  spirit;  and  there  is 
a  chance  that  the  manner  of  its  writ- 
ing will,  too,  have  aspects  of  original- 
ity. The  result  of  all  this  will  be  that 
the  publisher,  almost  tearful  over  his 
unselfish  nobility,  will  call  the  writ- 
76 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  NOVELIST 

er's  attention  to  the  fact  that  his  book, 
while  it  may  accomplish  a  critical  suc- 
cess, can  have  little  or  no  sale. 

The  inevitable  deduction  will  be  re- 
flected in  the  rate  of  the  royalty:  the 
most  honest  payment  possible  will  be 
five  per  cent,  on  the  first  two  thousand 
copies,  with  two  and  a  half  per  cent, 
more  after  that,  and,  perhaps,  a  future 
increase  to  ten  per  cent.  This  novel, 
submitted  toward  the  end  of  Septem- 
ber— novels  are  apt  to  be  written 
through  the  open  months — will  be  ac- 
cepted about  November  first.  By  that 
time  the  publisher's  spring  list  must 
be  pretty  well  in  hand — with  the  pres- 
ent manufacturing  conditions  a  num- 
ber of  the  spring  books  will  be  al- 
ready, mechanically,  under  way — and 
the  novel  we  are  considering  set  for 
publication  next  fall. 

It  will,  then,  appear  a  year  after  it 
was  submitted;  and,  in  the  general 
mode  of  the  publishing  business,  a 
royalty  report  will  be  returned  three 
months  later.  The  report  will  be  for- 
77 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

warded  in  three  months,  and  the  half 
yearly  payment  made  in  six.  This 
novel,  then,  let  us  say,  was  actually 
begun  late  in  the  winter  of  nineteen 
hundred  and  nineteen  and,  finished, 
it  was  submitted — this  is  very  rapid — ■ 
in  the  fall  of  that  year.  It  was  pub- 
lished in  the  autumn  of  nineteen 
twenty,  and  the  first  sum  of  money 
obtained  from  it  sometime  in  the  April 
or  May  of  nineteen  hundred  and 
twenty-one,  or  two  years  after  the  put- 
ting of  a  pen  to  paper. 

This  novel,  if  it  is  individual  and 
vigorously  fine — unless  it  happens  to 
be  carried  on  the  wave  of  a  chance 
popular  cause — must  be,  as  a  material 
property,  a  failure.  If,  for  instance, 
two  thousand  copies  are  sold,  the  pub- 
lisher will  about  get  his  money  back; 
and,  if  its  retail  price  is  two  dollars, 
after  two  j^ears  the  writer  will  receive 
two  hundred  dollars.  If  four  thou- 
sand are  sold,  the  publisher,  thinking 
himself  well  out  of  it,  will  make  a  lit- 
tle, and  the  writer  will  have  the  sum 
of  five  hundred  dollars. 
78 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  NOVELIST 

During  that  period,  you  see,  while 
he  may,  perhaps,  write  two  other 
novels,  he  can  have  none  pubhshed. 
A  second  will,  if  he  is  fortunate,  be  in 
preparation  for  appearance  not  soon- 
er than  six  months  after  the  first  came 
out  .  .  .that  is  the  best  he  can  hope 
for. 

Meanwhile,  he  is  at  the  necessary 
employment  of  finding  a  living  for 
himself  and,  perhaps,  two  or  three 
others.  The  temperament  of  a  novel- 
ist, his  dream  of  peace,  leads  him 
quickly  to  marriage.  If  he  is  able  he 
will,  first,  support  himself  by  contri- 
butions to  magazines  of  generous  pay- 
ments. Superficially,  that  has  an  ap- 
pearance of  contributing  to  his  main 
desire,  the  writing  of  novels;  but,  in 
reality,  it  is  not  only  tragically  far 
from  that  but  actually  destructive  to 
his  ability  as  a  novelist.  It  would  be 
closer  to  his  occupation  if  he  labored 
in  the  pit  of  a  steel  mill;  for  there,  at 
least,  he  would  come  in  contact  with 
the  material  of  his  aim. 

He  might  be,  again,  he  often  is,  em- 
79 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

ployed  in  writing  for  newspapers,  on 
special  or  general  assignments,  or 
even  in  a  moderate  editorial  capacity. 
But  that,  while  it  is  a  better  prepara- 
tion for  the  novel  than  that  offered  by 
the  public  taste  in  short  stories,  breaks 
his  power  of  concentration  upon  the 
longer  ventures.  There  is  hardly  a 
novelist  with  a  training  in  newspaper 
offices  whose  style  is  not  sharp  and 
brittle;  it  is,  through  habit,  focussed 
on  incidentals  rather  than  on  the 
whole.  And  of  the  other  multitudi- 
nous occupations  by  the  means  of 
which  beginning  novelists  manage  to 
keep  themselves  alive  nothing  in  de- 
tail need  be  said. 

My  own  experience,  attended  by 
some  unusually  fortunate  circum- 
stances, in  the  main  followed  this 
course.  The  Lay  Anthony — to  refer 
to  it  only  in  the  terms  of  its  reviews — • 
was,  as  a  first  book,  quite  generously 
noticed.  I  was  to  get  a  five  per  cent, 
royalty  after  a  preliminary  thousand 
copies  were  sold — then,  in,  I  think, 
80 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  NOVELIST 

nineteen  hundred  and  fourteen,  a  sale 
of  a  thousand  would  repay  the  pub- 
lisher— and  .  .  .  some  nine  hundred 
were  bought.  I  do  not  remember  the 
terms  of  the  contract  for  Mountain 
Blood,  brought  out  a  year  afterward; 
but  I  recall  very  sharply  that  it  did  not 
pay  me  a  penny  then.  I  sold  three 
papers  of  a  type  I  liked  to  a  magazine 
the  reverse  of  popular,  and  got  from 
them,  in  a  diminishing  scale,  fifteen, 
twelve  and  a  half  and  ten  dollars. 

That  brought  me  well  into  nineteen 
sixteen,  but — where  my  novels  were 
concerned — nowhere  near  a  material 
solvency.  The  fortunate  circum- 
stances alluded  to,  in  connection  with 
myself,  were  a  comfortable  place  to 
live,  an  unconquerable  laxness  in 
whatever  I  failed  to  like  or  only  half 
liked,  and  George  Horace  ■  Lorimer. 
But  all  that,  necessaiy  as  an  explana- 
tory note  to  my  comments,  is  a  digres- 
sion. 

The  point  is  that,  in  the  United 
States,  the  western  world,  of  the  pres- 
81 


THE  NO^^L  OF  TOMORROW 

ent,  the  profession  of  a  novelist  sim- 
ply does  not  exist.  The  novel,  dif- 
ferent from  the  lyrical  measures  of 
poetry  or  the  compactness  of  essays 
and  critical  papers,  requires  a  long 
time  for  its  composition;  it  needs  close 
thought  and  reasoning,  yes,  and  peace, 
quiet;  and  such  conditions,  today,  are 
expensive.  The  good  young  novel  is 
the  product  of  passion  and  resent- 
ment and  a  bitterness  at  injustice — 
qualities  missed  by  the  rich — or  it  is 
made  of  a  dream  of  loveliness  desir- 
able in  its  shining  remoteness  from 
the  immediate  scene. 

Things  like  those,  beautiful  and  far 
away,  or  close  and  tragic,  people,  the 
public,  do  not  like  and  will  not  pay 
for.  The  spectacle  of  suffering,  so 
purifying  to  the  individual,  the  mass 
neither  will  nor  can  support.  And — 
but  perhaps  it  is  only  my  conviction- 
fine  novels  can  be  constructed  from 
one  of  two  sources,  either  they  present 
the  heroic  or  cowardly  individual  op- 
posed to  hopeless  odds  and  death;  or 
82 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  NOVELIST 

they  have  to  do  with  that  which  was 
beautiful  and  is  lost.  There  is,  I  feel, 
nothing  else  worth  an  inattentive 
curse. 

The  novel,  itself  a  modern  affair,  is 
a  necessary  victim  of  modern  circum- 
stances: men  no  longer  have  any  lei- 
sure, any  quiet,  any  interruption  of 
the  waste  of  their  beings.  Individuals, 
individual  minds,  are  disappearing  in 
the  confusion  following  the  humani- 
tarian welter  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury. Any  art  is,  in  essence,  aristo- 
cratic, proud,  free  from  the  cheapness 
of  the  mob;  and  now  the  mob,  like  a 
turbid  and  dead  sea,  is  over  all  the 
land. 

There  is,  in  the  scheme  of  the  pres- 
ent, no  need,  no  general  need,  for 
truthful  or  delicate  novels.  Those 
that  are,  hopefully,  produced,  have  a 
short  or  a  long  life  in  a  very  limited 
sphere.  A  number  of  fine  novels, 
when  the  truth  or  a  delicacy  of  vision 
is  never  for  a  sentence  departed  from, 
will,  after  a  succession  of  books  and 
83 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

years,  undoubtedly  afford  a  dignified, 
but  hardly  plentiful,  living.  With 
them,  as  well,  a  reputation  for  integ- 
rity, for  honesty  and  courage,  will 
grow  and  fix  itself  in  men's  minds; 
and  that  is  a  gieat  and  a  happy 
accomplishment. 

That,  however,  lies  in  the  distant 
future;  the  present  is  devastating;  and 
there  isn't,  in  the  United  States,  even 
the  small  pension  that  fell  to  Mr.  Con- 
rad. What,  specially,  makes  this  con- 
dition sad  is  the  fact  that  its  grimness 
is  accompanied  by  the  most  hearten- 
ing proclamations  and  pretensions. 
The  whole  American  world,  it  is  made 
to  appear,  is  waiting  impatiently  with 
laurels  and  gold  for  distinguished  na- 
tive creative  writers.  It  is  a  situation 
that  would  be  resembled  by  accom- 
panying a  dark  secretive  play  with  the 
loud  music  of  a  Follies  Review. 

A  cast  clamor  of  hj'^pocrisy,  of  self- 
laudation,  has  always  resounded 
about  the  arts  of  music  and  literature; 
the  titles  of  admirable  novels  are, 
84 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  NOVELIST 

seemingly,  on  all  sentient  lips;  the 
titles  are,  yes  and  even  rude  ideas  of 
the  plans  of  writing;  a  few  actual  vol- 
umes are  prominent  upon  library 
tables  .  .  .  but  that  is  as  far  as  it  goes. 
The  novels  themselves,  like  the  de- 
frauded relatives  of  prosperous  and 
comfortable  families,  are  not  wanted 
around.  It  isn't  pleasant  for  the  snug- 
ly-minded, where  they  are  sensitive  at 
all,  to  be  in  the  company  of  Sherwood 
Anderson.  There  is  really  no  reason 
why  they  should  have  him  unsettling 
their  luxurious  somnolence;  in  such  a 
case  I  shouldn't  put  up  with  him  for  a 
second.  I'd  dismiss  The  Triumph  of 
the  Egg  with  a  vague  satisfactory  re- 
mark about  the  need  to  suppress  these 
propertyless  agitators.  Ship  'em  to 
Rooshia,  I  would  advise.  Or  else  I'd 
make  it  clear  that  no  such  books  could 
have  a  place  in  my  family. 

That  is  unanswerable,  it  Is,  and  no 

argument  or  effort  can  overthrow  it. 

However,   I  might  wish  for  a  better 

world — and,  luckily,  it  is  not  on  my 

85 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

sheet  to  struggle  for  improvements — 
with  the  earth  as  it  is  I  can  not  con- 
scientiously blame  its  attitude  toward 
men  who  are,  in  essence,  its  bitterest 
critics.  To  put  down  "love  those  that 
revile  you"  is  nothing  more  than  a 
vain  display  of  ink. 

Literature,  as  an  art,  as  a  service  of 
beauty,  has  little  or  no  place  in  the 
modern  state  of  societ}^  and  it  is  just 
possible  that  it  will  never  be  of  im- 
portance again.  Maybe,  forever,  it  is 
all  over,  only  a  lingering  and  cher- 
ished memory  of  something  fantastic 
in  the  hearts  of  a  dwindling  few. 
There  is — to  my  mind,  pessimistic  in 
cast — no  evidence  of  even  an  infin- 
itely delayed  improvement  in  human- 
ity; it  is  no  more  than  the  alternate 
fading  and  glow  of  a  charcoal  fire,  a 
core  of  heat,  blown  on  intermittently 
by  a  bellows.  When  the  leathers  of 
the  bellows  wear  out,  when  the  gases 
of  the  charcoal  are  exhausted,  there 
will  be  a  minute  fleck,  a  dead  drifting 
atom,  of  ash. 

86 


THE  PROFESSION  OF  NOVELIST 

Yet,  against  all  calamity — and  I 
have  said  this  so  often  that  I  must 
seem  to  be  falling  into  the  repetitious 
habit  of  old  age — only  beauty,  woven 
in  fragile  materials  or  in  hard  metal 
and  stone,  is  more  durable  than  time. 
A  fragmentary  poem  will  be  death- 
less, an  arrangement  of  the  spirit  in 
prose  will  last,  as  our  time  runs,  for- 
ever; but  that  will  keep  no  body,  and 
very  little  hope,  warm. 


THE  NEW  NOVEL 

by 
Robert  Herrick 


VIII 
THE  NEW  NOVEL 

What  is  the  new  novel  to  be?  In 
retrospect  from  another  generation 
this  phenomenon  may  not  seem,  after 
all,  so  different  from  its  forerunners 
as  contemporary  self-consciousness 
would  like  us  to  believe.  Time  has  a 
leveling  way  with  all  human  accom- 
plishments, even  those  done  in  the 
pure  ether  of  art,  and  the  surviving 
landmarks  often  seem  to  have  little 
relation  with  the  intervening  valleys, 
however  noisily  these  were  once  in- 
habited. The  increasing  preoccupa- 
tion with  the  novel  in  our  days  and 
its  voluminous  and  multifarious  pro- 
duction may  be  due  less  to  a  renewed 
or  undiscovered  vitality  in  the  form 
itself  than  to  a  growing  realization  of 
its  adaptability  to  the  needs  of  a 
crowded  and  self-conscious  civiliza- 
tion. For  it  is  beyond  dispute  that  the 
91 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

novel  has  taken  its  place  with  the  cin- 
ema and  the  newspaper  in  the  vast 
cultural  and  interpretative  effort  of 
our  world.  Tliat  it  is  discovering 
within  its  flexible  form  new  possibil- 
ities for  the  exploitation  of  new  fields 
promises  little  for  its  present  or  future 
performance.  It  is  the  easiest  and 
simplest  weapon  of  self-revelation  for 
a  democratic  society  (however  diffi- 
cult and  toilsome  the  complete  mas- 
tery of  its  art  is)  and  in  its  deepest 
essence  must  remain  always  autobio- 
graphical, and  hence  universally 
alluring. 

During  the  late  century  the  novel 
oscillated  outwardly  between  the  rival 
camps  of  Realism  and  Romance.  The 
long,  inconclusive  battle  of  the  critics 
which  somewhat  languidly  animated 
the  intellectual  life  of  the  late  nine- 
teenth century  was  largely  concerned 
with  the  defence  and  the  attack  of 
these  two  metaphysical  unrealities,  and 
it  was  not  until  the  century  mark  was 
safely  rounded  that  we  began  to  real- 
92 


THE  NEW  NOVEL 

ize  that  the  prolonged  battle  about 
realism  and  romance,  like  all  vehe- 
ment conflicts,  had  been  waged  in  a 
fog  of  misunderstanding  for  an  im- 
practical victory.  Neither  side  of  the 
controversy  had  an  exclusive  posses- 
sion of  the  truth,  for  neither  ideal  ex- 
isted except  in  the  partisan  imagina- 
tion of  the  theorist,  and  the  sturdier 
practitioners  of  the  art  dodged  back 
and  forth  between  the  embattled 
camps — as  they  always  have  done  and 
always  will  do.  For  realism  and  ro- 
mance represent,  verbally,  nothing 
more  than  two  persistent  moods  of  hu- 
manity, under  which  it  surveys  itself 
and  the  universe  intermittently,  not 
mutually  exclusive,  and  together  not 
completely  occupying  the  ample  terri- 
tory of  the  human  spirit.  Consistent 
realism  can  be  found  only  in  the  work 
of  inferior  and  unimaginative  artists, 
because  they  are  more  easily  satisfied 
with  surfaces,  and  a  world  of  surfaces 
is  the  nearest  approach  to  the  absolute 
in  a  subjective  universe.  Conversely 
93 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

it  may  be  said  that  consistent  romance 
easily  becomes  nonsense,  and  human 
beings  striving  on  the  whole  for  the 
use  of  their  intelligence  quickly  sur- 
feit with  undiluted  romance.  That  is 
what  happened  exactly  at  the  end  of 
the  last  century  when,  in  this  country 
especially,  a  new  and  uneducated 
reading  public  avid  for  simple  imag- 
inative excitement  boosted  the  sales  of 
flimsy  romantic  novels  to  unheard  of 
figures,  then  overnight  rejected  its 
passion. 

With  the  snuffing  out  of  this  unsub- 
stantial romance,  the  way  was  cleared 
for  better  things  (not  that  the  cream- 
puff  "line"  of  romance  has  wholly  dis- 
appeared or  ever  will  lack  favor  in  a 
world  so  largely  composed  of  naive 
people,  but  the  flavors  have  been 
changed,  and  the  more  earnest  crafts- 
men no  longer  supply  the  market  for 
this  kind  of  goods).  The  younger  and 
more  serious  minded  writers  having 
given  over  the  concoction  of  saccha- 
rine toys  for  the  popular  taste,  ignor- 
94 


THE  NEW  NOVEL 

ing  the  tiresome  debates  of  the  critics, 
went  out  for  fresh  adventure,  and 
here  it  was  that  for  nearly  a  genera- 
tion England  led  the  way.  There  be- 
gan a  period  of  interesting  experi- 
mentation, which  pushed  the  novel 
into  untried  fields  and  carried  it  for 
good  and  all  beyond  that  futile  con- 
troversy of  realism  and  romance. 
Novelists  forgot  their  old  preoccupa- 
tions, as  to  what  could  and  could  not 
be  done  in  fiction,  what  the  public 
would  and  would  not  "stand  for." 
They  have  found  that  the  scope  of  the 
novel  can  be  indefinitely  stretched  to 
include  new  matters  and  new  meth- 
ods and  that  the  reading  public  will 
take — that  is  some  part  of  it  will  take 
— whatever  gives  promise  of  novelty 
or  a  fresh  perception  of  the  old.  Even 
dullness!  For  the  ancient  truth  that 
the  dull  and  the  commonplace  belong 
properly  to  life  and  can  even  be  en- 
dured in  literature  when  intelligently 
presented  has  also  been  rediscovered. 
Under  the  exhilarating  leadersliip  of 
95 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

Mr.  Wells  the  new  English  novel  as- 
sumed much  of  the  kaleidoscopic  vari- 
ety of  the  newspaper  and  tried  to 
teach  the  reader  to  think,  at  least  to 
consider  many  hitherto  unfamiliar 
subjects.  It  also  acquired,  at  many 
hands,  a  new  frankness  about  human 
sexuality,  or  perhaps  merely  lost  a 
puritan  reticence  of  expression  on  pri- 
vate matters  which  had  been  tempo- 
rarily imposed  upon  it  by  public  man- 
ners. Finally  it  began  a  search  of  the 
Freudean  caves  for  fresh  motives  and 
new  thrills.  Incidentally  it  had  ac- 
quired from  the  glib  interpretation 
of  those  opulent  years  just  before  the 
war,  many  of  the  European  tricks  of 
craftsmanship  that  had  heretofore 
been  concealed  from  the  Anglo-Saxon 
by  the  veil  of  a  foreign  language.  In 
short  the  novelist's  art  had  become, 
like  morals,  thoroughly  eclectic  and 
individual,  choosing  its  methods  and 
its  materials  where  it  found  anything 
to  its  purpose,  often  whimsically. 
With  this  surprising  wealth  of  plun- 
96 


THE  NEW  NOVEL 

der  both  in  matter  and  form,  it  re- 
mains to  be  said  in  all  honesty  that 
this  period  had  no  great  master  of  the 
prose  epic, — no  Tolstoy,  no  Zola,  no 
Hardy — nor  even  a  Meredith,  and  the 
master  ironist  of  the  period  was  a 
Frenchman  and  his  effulgence  was 
that  of  a  splendid  and  lingering  with- 
drawal. 

Thus,  then,  to  the  period  set  for  all 
things  by  the  war.  Since  the  war  the 
novel,  at  least  the  more  vivid  interest 
in  its  possibilities,  has  come  to  this 
side  of  the  Atlantic.  For  although  ex- 
perimentation still  goes  on  in  Eng- 
land, more  especially  among  the 
younger  women  novelists,  the  triumph 
of  arresting  accomplishment  seems 
for  the  moment  quite  departed.  And 
in  this  country,  though  there  is  any- 
thing but  a  pause,  one  feels  the  antici- 
patory bustle  of  the  approaching 
accouchement  rather  than  the  happy 
certainty  of  an  actual  delivery.  Only 
the  hard  pressed  newspaper  critic  and 
that  indefatigable  enthusiast  who 
97 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

composes  the  eulogies  on  "jackets" 
any  longer  believe  in  the  American 
novel.  Nevertheless  we  await  with 
more  than  usual  eagerness  those 
American  novels  which  will  fully  jus- 
tify the  present  wide  interest  in  the  art 
of  fiction.  America  is  undoubtedly 
waiting  to  be  "done" — adequately,  and 
a  considerable  number  of  excellent 
experiments  attest  the  fact  that  the 
writers  are  either  already  here  or  will 
shortly  appear,  who  will  do  the  big 
fields  descriptively,  analytically  and 
synthetically  with  all  the  up-to-date 
technique  (including  Freud)  and  with 
something  better  than  "promise." 
They  will  find,  indeed,  that  much  ex- 
ploratory work  has  already  been  ac- 
complished unobtrusively  by  their 
elders,  though  most  may  seem  to  de- 
mand redoing,  as  it  should  in  every 
generation.  And  they  will  also  find 
(which  their  elders  did  not)  that  the 
subject  is  in  a  serious  mood,  willing, 
nay  anxious  to  be  "done."  The  Amer- 
ican public  is  now  ready  and  able  to 
98 


THE  NEW  NOVEL 

take  an  objectively  cool  and  interested 
attitude  toward  the  reactions  which 
it  creates  in  the  artist  and  his  result- 
ant picture.  That  will  be  immensely 
helpful  to  the  worker,  for  in  this  deli- 
cate undertaking  there  must  always 
be  a  close  cooperation  between  the  ar- 
tist and  the  sitter.  America  is  ready — 
or  nearly  ready — for  a  reappraise- 
ment  and  a  restatement  of  herself.  .  .  . 
Although  this  seems  to  speak  en- 
couragingly for  an  interesting  and 
valid  accomplishment  before  the 
younger  American  novelists,  freed 
and  equipped  as  I  have  tried  to  sug- 
gest in  the  foregoing  paragraphs  by 
the  progress  of  the  art  through  the  last 
generation,  yet  it  by  no  means  prophe- 
sies confidently  the  coming  at  once  of 
great  novels  or  great  novelists.  For 
these  depend,  I  take  it,  upon  certain 
elements  which  in  our  ordinary  dis- 
cussions we  are  only  too  apt  to  ignore. 
One  is  upon  the  spiritual  depth  of  the 
soil  to  be  worked.  If  Main  Street  is  to 
date  a  fair  report  upon  the  intelligence 
99 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

and  the  emotional  depth  of  these 
United  States,  by  and  large  (which  I 
believe  it  is),  then  even  the  greatest 
craftsman  will  have  to  wait  for  his 
full  harvest.  One  does  not  make  en- 
during brick  from  that  straw!  But  in 
the  tremulous  gropings  of  our  fast 
changing  time  he  may  not  have  to 
wait  long.  ...  As  for  the  great  novel- 
ist himself,  it  is  well  to  remember  that 
craftsmanship,  method  and  manner 
and  material  too,  are  but  the  super- 
ficies of  a  great  art.  The  inner,  and 
the  incalculable  factor  is  the  quality  of 
the  individual  spirit — the  soul  (if  I 
may  be  permitted  to  lapse  into  the 
vocabulary  of  my  ancestors).  Even 
with  the  novel  I  think  we  should  be 
more  interested  in  that,  more  con- 
cerned with  that,  than  we  are  with  the 
matter  of  the  tools  employed.  We 
shall  never  be  content  with  simply 
having  our  work  "done,"  no  matter 
how  faithfully,  nor  how  dexterously 
the  artists  wield  their  tools.  What  we 
are  waiting  for  is  a  new  world  to  be 
100 


THE  NEW  NOVEL 

revealed  to  us  out  of  the  disguise  of 
the  familiar  and  the  worn  through  the 
spirit  of  some  one  who  sees  deeper 
and  farther  and  more  understandingly 
than  we  do,  into  whose  vision  we  can 
resign  ourselves  confidently,  as  the  re- 
ligious convert  resigns  himself  upon 
the  bosom  of  authority  and  there 
finds  the  desired  relief  and  freedom. 
Frankly  I  do  not  see  upon  the  horizon 
of  my  today  any  evidence  of  such  a 
comprehending  creator,  fit  to  reveal 
the  new  secrets  of  this  tumultuous 
scene,  and  to  impose  his  own  authori- 
tative, indubitable  sense  of  its  life. 
(Now  that  the  great  Anatole,  alas,  is 
gathering  the  last  threads  of  his  long 
and  finely  woven  skein!)  When  that 
larger  personality  arrives  it  wdll  make 
little  difference  what  his  method  may 
be  or  his  material  or  where  he  starts, 
whether  in  Gopher  Prairie  or  New 
York,  because  he  will  steadily  and 
surely  respin  the  whole  of  our  uni- 
verse from  whatever  accidental  frag- 
ments he  may  happen  upon,  and  will 
101 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

consistently  people  it  out  of  the  secret 
stores  of  his  own  life. 

For  we  must  not  forget  that  men 
and  women,  however  much  at  times 
they  may  seem  to  ignore  or  even  repu- 
diate the  fact,  are  more  interested  in 
the  inner  truth  buried  somewhere 
within  their  souls,  than  with  all  the 
outer  adjustments  and  mechanics  of 
their  lives — and  the  two  are  only  inci- 
dentally related. 


A  NOTE  ON  THE  NOVEL 

by 
Harvey  O'Higgins 


IX 
A  NOTE  ON  THE  NOVEL 

The  writing  of  a  novel  is  always  a 
collaboration — like  the  production  of 
any  other  work  of  imaginative  art. 
One  of  the  collaborators  is  chiefly  con- 
cerned with  form;  he  takes  the  mate- 
rial offered  him  by  his  partner, 
chooses  among  it,  arranges  it,  makes 
his  pattern  with  it.  The  other  collab- 
orator is  largely  responsible  for  scope, 
but  he  affects  form  by  the  quality  and 
abundance  of  the  material  he  offers 
and  by  the  strength  of  his  desire  to 
have  it  used.  These  two  collaborators 
have  had  many  names  in  the  history 
of  art.  They  are  now  fashionably 
known  as  the  conscious  mind  and  the 
subconscious.  They  have  been  much 
studied  by  the  psychologists  of  late; 
the  terms  of  their  collaboration,  in  life 
as  in  art,  are  becoming  more  or  less 
known;  and  that  knowledge  is  impor- 
105 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

tant  in  any  consideration  of  the  form 
and  scope  of  the  novel. 

The  conscious  mind  has  been  de- 
scribed as  a  sort  of  hand  that  has  de- 
veloped out  of  the  subconscious  in 
order  the  better  to  grasp  and  manipu- 
late reality.  As  a  hand,  it  is  always 
busy  trying  to  arrange  in  some  sort  of 
comprehensible  picture  the  chaos  and 
muddle  of  facts  around  us.  It  is  al- 
ways making  patterns — patterns  of 
cause  and  effect,  patterns  of  natural 
law  or  moral  law,  patterns  of  beauty, 
patterns  of  sequence  and  theme  and 
recognizable  purpose.  Into  art,  it 
puts  design  and  symmetry  and  bal- 
ance and  symphony  and  all  those 
other  qualities  that  make  the  disorder 
of  actuality  less  bewildering  to  look 
upon.  It  continually  leaves  outside  of 
its  pattern  great  numbers  of  facts 
which  it  can  not  fit  into  its  immediate 
arrangement — and  uses  these  subse- 
quently in  other  patterns.  And,  under 
the  name  of  criticism,  it  studies  its 
past  patterns  and  deduces  what  it 
106 


A  NOTE  ON  THE  NOVEL 

calls  the  laws  of  art  from  these  per- 
formances and  tries  to  make  all  future 
performances  conform  to  those  laws. 

But  the  subconscious  mind — the 
dream  mind — seems  to  have  little  re- 
spect for  reality  and  less  for  pattern. 
It  furnishes  its  material  to  intelligence 
under  impulses  of  its  own.  It  is  the 
primitive  animal  mind,  emotional, 
instinctive  and  sympathetically  intui- 
tive. It  merely  dreams  dreams, 
making  for  itself  pictures  that  express 
instinctive  desires,  and  apparently  get- 
ting relief  for  instinctive  tensions  in 
mere  hallucinations  of  relief.  And 
the  psychic  origin  and  impulse  behind 
these  hallucinations  is  the  need  of  the 
human  ego  to  get  its  way  against  real- 
ity, to  dominate  reality  in  imagination 
when  it  can  not  dominate  in  fact. 

For  these  reasons,  it  seems  to  me 
that  there  can  be  no  final  form  in  any 
art  and  no  set  limit  to  its  scope.  The 
form  of  the  novel  will  continue  to 
change  as  intellect  devises  new  pat- 
terns to  include  new  dreams  from  the 
107 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

subconscious;  and  these  dreams  will 
alter  and  enlarge  the  scope  of  the 
novel  as  the  human  ego  enlarges  its 
experience  of  the  reality  which  it  is 
trying  to  dominate.  The  difference 
between  the  romantic  novel  and  the 
realistic  will  be  a  difference  in  the 
manner  of  this  domination — the  real- 
ist attempting  to  subdue  reality  by 
understanding  it  and  the  romanticist 
to  defeat  reality  by  escaping  from  it. 
The  humorous  fictionist  will  seek  to 
raise  himself  above  reality  by  laugh- 
ing at  it.  The  crusading  novelist  will 
make  war  on  reality  and  try  to  over- 
come it  with  reforms. 

The  most  popular  American  novel 
in  the  past  has  been  the  romantic,  be- 
cause the  great  need  of  the  American 
psyche  has  been  to  escape  the  pres- 
sure of  reality.  American  humor  has 
long  supported  us  in  a  feeling  of  su- 
periority to  reality  by  helping  us  to 
laugh  at  it.  Now  the  crusading  novel 
is  becoming  popular  in  its  appeal  to 
us  to  change  a  reality  which  we  have 
108 


A  NOTE  ON  THE  NOVEL 

neither  escaped  nor  laughed  out  of  ex- 
istence. It  remains  for  us  to  produce 
an  artist — and  a  public  to  support  him 
— who  shall  seek  to  dominate  reality 
by  knowing  it  and  understanding  it 
and  accepting  it  as  it  is.  The  future 
form  and  scope  of  the  American  novel 
will  probably  be  in  his  hands. 


A  BRACE  OF  DEFINITIONS  AND  A 
SHORT  CODE 

hy 
Henry  Kitchell  Webster 


X 


A  BRACE  OF  DEFINITIONS  AND  A 
SHORT  CODE 

There  is  a  wholesome  catholicity 
about  the  definition  of  the  novel  in 
The  Concise  Oxford:  "fictitious  prose 
narrative  of  sufficient  length  to  fill 
one  or  more  volumes,  portraying  char- 
acters and  actions  representative  of 
real  life  in  continuous  plot."  The  two 
components  in  this  definition  give  it  a 
width  of  angle  inclusive  of  two  easily 
distinguishable  sorts  of  work.  One  of 
these  relies  upon  the  contrivance  of 
its  pattern  for  maintaining  the  read- 
er's concern,  the  performers  being 
more  or  less  rigidly  conventionalized 
types.  The  other  appeals  to  this  same 
concern  through  the  authenticity  of  its 
characters  and  their  experiences.  In 
the  currency  of  the  day,  it  is  the  latter 
sort,  the  novel  of  character — the  por- 
trait rather  than  the  decoration, 
113 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

which  gets  itself  spoken  of  as  "the 
novel"  or  "the  serious  novel." 

I  am  aware  that  I  have  taken  con- 
troversial ground  in  making  a  classi- 
fication froin  the  reader's  point  of 
view,  for  many  of  my  younger  col- 
leagues will  hardly  admit  that  the 
reader  exists,  let  alone  postulate  him 
as  a  relevant  factor  in  the  affair.  In 
the  light  of  the  brilliant  performances 
of  some  of  these  younger  and  newer 
novelists,  one  docs  well  to  think  twice 
before  taking  issue  with  them  upon 
an  abstraction  of  this  sort;  but  I 
have  thought  twice  and  more  than 
twice,  and  to  me  the  thing  is  funda- 
mental. 

It  seems  to  me  that  no  act  of  crea- 
tion, whether  parthenogenetic  or 
otherwise,  is  real  unless  it  gives  a 
valid  objectivity  to  the  created  thing; 
sets  it  up  by  itself,  on  its  own  feet,  and 
leaves  it  to  walk  alone,  live  its  own 
life,  weather  its  own  storms.  An  act 
whicli  doesn't  result  in  the  projection 
and  detachment  of  an  objective  entity 
of  some  sort  isn't  a  creative  act  at  all 
114 


A  BRACE  OF  DEFINITIONS 

but  a  mere  self-satisfying  gesture. 
The  only  objective  existence  a  novel 
can  have  is  through  its  readers,  and, 
therefore,  it  is  from  the  point  of  view 
of  its  readers  that  it  must  be  judged. 
It  must  be  judged  by  itself,  without 
reference  to  its  creator;  it  must  have 
articulation  enough  in  its  own  bones 
to  enable  it  to  stand  alone,  and  vitality 
enough  between  its  own  covers  to 
keep  it  alive. 

That's  plain  enough,  I  think,  so  far, 
but  it  leaves  the  novelist  in  a  diffi- 
culty; confronts  him,  anyhow,  with  a 
demand  for  a  rather  fine  distinction. 
Does  this  objective  theory  of  the  novel 
imply  a  contact  between  the  novelist 
and  his  reader?  I  believe  it  does,  but 
I  hasten  to  qualify  this  admission  by 
saying  that  the  only  reader  whose  ap- 
probation the  novelist  has  any  con- 
cern with  is  himself.  But  himself  as 
reader  not  as  author.  He  must  write 
what  he  likes,  but  he  must  make  what 
he  writes  intelligible  to  a  stranger 
whose  likes  and  feelings  and  associa- 
tions are  similar  to  his  own. 
115 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

Writing  thus,  for  his  alter  ego,  he 
gives  himself,  of  course,  dead  away, 
and  his  courage  in  giving  himself 
dead  away  is  the  measure  of  his  seri- 
ousness. If  he  writes  up  to  a  supe- 
rior reader  or  down  to  an  inferior 
reader,  he  is  equally  a  snob  and  the 
truth  is  not  in  him. 

I'd  like,  with  the  wedge  of  another 
definition,  to  split  once  more  the  half 
log  we  have  left.  There  are  still  two 
sorts  of  novel  a  man  may  write,  deter- 
mined not  so  much  by  the  selection  of 
his  character  material  as  by  his  atti- 
tude toward  that  material.  He  may 
select  unfamiliar  types  and  inake 
their  unfamiliarity  the  attractive  thing 
about  them.  He  relies,  if  he  does  this, 
upon  what  a  city  editor  would  call  the 
news  value  of  his  characters.  He  ac- 
cents their  distinctive  speech,  eti- 
quette, point  of  view.  If  he  does  it 
plausibly,  he  gives  his  readers  a  sense, 
not  always  illusory  either,  of  being  in- 
creased in  worldly  wisdom,  of  becom- 
ing cosmopolites.  At  least  they  are 
116 


A  BRACE  OF  DEFINITIONS 

personally  conducted  tourists,  and,  if 
the  conductor  knows  his  business, 
they  have  a  wonderful  time.  They  go 
back-stage;  they  visit  western  ranches, 
middle-western  small  towns,  Holly- 
wood, the  Latin  Quarter,  India;  they 
learn  the  distinctive  slang  of  the 
chorus  girl,  the  cowboy,  the  hick,  the 
British  subaltern  and  his  Mrs. 
Hauxbee. 

It  is  possible,  even  in  dealing  with 
this  unfamiliar  material,  to  put  the 
stress  on  the  other  foot,  accenting  and 
revealing  not  the  surface  strangeness 
of  these  aliens  but  their  underlying 
common  humanity.  "Folks,"  Sinclair 
Lewis  says  very  earnestly,  "are  folks. 
The  hobo,  the  itinerant  tailor  and  the 
hick,  just  as  much  as  the  college  pro- 
fessor, the  business  man  and  the  soci- 
ety woman."  And  conversely,  of 
course — though  I  never  have  heard 
Mr.  Lewis  say  this — the  college  pro- 
fessor, the  business  man  and  the  soci- 
ety woman  as  much  as  the  hobo,  the 
tailor  and  the  hick.  So  this  question 
117 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

asks  itself;  why,  if  common  humanity 
is  a  novelist's  concern,  should  he  go 
afield  to  look  for  it? 

The  critical  fashion  of  the  day  pro- 
scribes the  exceptional.  Unless  the 
novelist  wishes  to  rest  under  the  im- 
putation of  romanticizing,  let  him 
write  about  commonplace  people,  dull 
inarticulate  earthbound  people,  and 
let  him  courageously  make  them  as 
dull  and  inarticulate  and  earthbound 
as  the  majority  of  mankind  admit- 
tedly are.  Let  their  deeds  be  still- 
born and  their  conversation  mere  un- 
grammatical  adumbrations  of  their 
unrecognized  desires. 

Is  it  heresy  to  ask  whether  this  sort 
of  thing  is  not  tourist  fiction  just  as 
the  cowboy  and  chorus  girl  stuff  is 
tourist  fiction?  Of  course,  nobody  is 
a  cowboy  to  himself,  nor  a  chorus  girl. 
Is  any  one  a  dull  earthbound  clod?  Is 
the  brave  j'oung  radical  who  writes 
about  earthbound  clods,  emphasizing 
their  dull  inexpressiveness — is  he,  to 
himself,  dull  and  inarticulate  and 
118 


A  BRACE  OF  DEFINITIONS 

earthbound?  He  is  not.  He  is  an  ex- 
ceptional person.  He  is  so  excep- 
tional that  dullness  fascinates  him. 
He  is  so  expressive  that  inarticulate- 
ness has  a  news  value  for  him. 

My  professional  code  boils  down  to 
about  this: 

The  novelist  should  give  his  work 
form  and  structure  enough  to  make  it 
intelligible  to  others  than  himself.  He 
should  write  at  his  own  level,  neither 
up  nor  down.  He  should  not  flinch 
from  giving  himself  away.  He  should 
irate  at  higher  value  the  experience 
which,  in  the  natural  course  of  things, 
comes  his  way  than  that  experience 
which  he  has  gone  looking  for.  He 
should  not  overrate  the  importance  of 
ideas.  He  should  not  despise  his  char- 
acters. He  should  try  to  make  every 
word  and  act  of  his  characters  con- 
cretely true,  and  let  universality 
alone,  for  nothing  ever  was  universal 
that  began  by  trying  to  be. 


SPLITTING  FICTION  THREE  WAYS 

by 
William  Allen  White 


XI 
SPLITTING  FICTION  THREE  WAYS 

Any  attempt  to  place  the  novel  in- 
side of  definitions,  setting  its  meets 
and  bounds,  brings  us  up  sharply 
against  the  insistent  question  asked  of 
old  and  never  answered,  "What  is 
art?"  And  for  himself,  and  his  cos- 
mos, one  man's  guess  at  the  answer  is 
as  good  as  another's,  probably  rather 
better.  For  every  man  has  his  own 
scheme  of  creation.  Every  man  is  set 
down  alone  under  the  stars  and  on  the 
more  or  less  solid  earth,  to  build  out 
of  his  conscious  experience  the  fabric 
of  the  dream  in  which  he  walks.  If  he 
sets  down  some  account  of  his  dream, 
some  definition  of  his  universe  in 
terms  of  love  or  fear  or  hate  or  joy 
or  any  emotional  medium  in  which 
his  conviction  comes  to  him  about  life, 
what  he  makes,  for  him  is  art.  But  it 
is  of  necessity  not  art  for  any  one  else. 
123 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

It  may  be  an  obscure  picture  on  the 
sand,  drawn  with  a  shell  or  stick.  It 
may  be  a  Poem  of  Ecstasy  or  it  may  be 
a  cathedral  or  a  large  fat  Mrs.  Rubens 
in  oil,  or  a  patent  Madame  X.  leisurely 
waiting  for  the  laundry  wagon  to 
bring  her  first  aid  in  the  matter  of 
clothes !  Whatever  it  may  be,  to  some 
man  the  thing  means  a  conviction 
about  the  meaning  of  life.  To  its  cre- 
ator, if  to  no  other  soul  on  earth,  the 
thing  created  in  joy  or  pain  or  fear  or 
love  or  whatever  rise  of  pulse  beat, 
means  art.  Others,  of  course,  need 
not  accept  it  as  art;  being  in  ribald 
spirits  they  may  laugh  at  it,  or  other- 
wise, being  miean  and  supercilious 
they  may  try  to  suppress  and  censor 
the  man's  expression,  which  may  seem 
to  others  ugly  or  indecent,  or  stupid 
or  wicked  beyond  tears.  But  whether 
they  censor  it  in  laughter  or  in  rage, 
they  must  not  forget  that  for  the  man 
who  made  it  the  thing  was  art.  He 
has  a  right  to  issue  his  challenge  to  the 
world  and  stand  or  fall  by  it. 
124 


SPLITTING  FICTION  THREE  WAYS 

So  any  man's  novel  has  its  rights. 
Its  rights  are  limited.  We  don't  have 
to  read  it,  thank  Heavens!  We  don't 
have  to  approve  it,  having  read  it. 
We  have  the  royal  privilege  of  declar- 
ing that  the  author  is  a  fool;  that  no 
such  world  as  he  has  tried  to  depict 
ever  did  or  could  or  should  exist; 
which  being  translated  only  means 
that  the  novelist  does  not  see  our 
world.  But,  as  fellow  travelers  in  a 
number  of  different  universes,  and 
varying  stages  of  cosmic  environment, 
we  have  no  right  as  potential  artists 
to  deny  him  the  right  to  print  and 
peddle  the  poor  thing  that  is  his  own. 

Now,  here  we  come  to  the  doctrine 
of  a  democratic  theory  in  criticism. 
And  we  must  come  to  it  when  we  ad- 
mit a  Variety  of  different  worlds  sur- 
rounding the  consciousness  of  human 
beings.  Now,  this  democratic  theory 
of  criticism  like  all  democratic  theo- 
ries and  doctrines  is  based  upon  a 
principle  of  tolerance,  of  mutual  re- 
spect, of  neighborly  kinship  in  the  cos- 
125 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

mos.  And  if  we  follow  a  democratic 
theory  of  criticism  art  must  not  de- 
velop a  snobbery,  in  its  lower  levels, 
in,  say,  the  level  of  criticism.  To  set 
up  rigid  standards,  to  make  inexor- 
able rules,  to  apply  static  tests,  to  ac- 
cept or  reject  any  man's  account  of 
the  world  in  which  he  lives  as  false 
and  foolish  is  dangerous.  Also  demo- 
cratically it  is  unfair.  A  number  of 
critics  affect  to  giggle  at  the  novels  of 
Mr.  Harold  Bell  Wright.  Their  fathers 
sniffed  at  Bertha  M.  Clay.  To 
some  of  us  Mr.  Wright  does  seem  to 
walk  among  chromos  as  one  who  lives 
in  a  vast  forest  of  Sunday  supple- 
ments. And  there  are  those  who  feel 
that  Mr.  Theodore  Dreiser's  world  is 
afflicted  with  misanthropy  and 
worms.  As  between  a  world  of 
"Simply  to  Thy  Cross  I  Cling"  done  in 
gaudy  colors  and  a  world  painted 
from  the  mud  of  a  pig  pen  many  an 
average  man  or  woman  shrinks  from 
choice.  It  is  not  a  question  of  art. 
There  is  no  more  art  in  Sister  Carrie 
126 


SPLITTING  FICTION  THREE  WAYS 

for  instance  than  in  Pollyanna.  It  is 
largely  a  question  of  the  world  in 
which  the  authors  move,  of  the  phi- 
losophy of  life  which  inspires  the  writ- 
er. And  Sister  Carrie  may  well  be  as 
false  as  Pollyanna  in  its  philosophy. 
Life  is  doubtless  highly  carrieful — to 
coin  a  word — for  Mr.  Dreiser,  and  for 
Mrs.  Porter  it  is  surely  pollyaneous; 
but  for  a  lot  of  us  it  is  neither.  We 
trek  along  on  the  middle  plane  out  of 
the  heights  where  Pollyanna  walks  in 
trailing  clouds  of  glory,  and  above  the 
depths  where  Sister  Carrie  sloshes  in 
the  mud  and  muck.  Possibly  these 
middle  averages  toddle  about  with 
Alice  Adams. 

So  let  us  for  the  sake  of  illustration 
say  that  broadly  there  abide  these 
three  views  of  modern  American  life 
personified  by  these  three  estimable 
young  women.  Sister  Carrie,  Polly- 
anna and  Alice  Adams.  They  per- 
sonify rather  distinctive  groups  in  our 
novel  reading  public.  Possibly  the 
groups  represent  stratifications  in  the 
127 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

matter  of  view-point  of  life  found  in 
our  book  buying  public.  Why  has  not 
each  crowd  the  right  to  its  own  opin- 
ion, and  why  should  the  exponents  of 
either  group  stick  up  their  noses  at 
the  others?  If  it  pleases  the  Freeman 
as  the  exponent  of  soured  and  pickled 
brains  and  heart  and  genital  intestines 
to  purvey  that  kind  of  wares — say  lit- 
erary tripes  and  caviar — well  and 
good.  The  soured  soul  market  is  a 
trifle  slow;  but  it  is  steady  and  seems 
to  be  growing.  Then  why  try  to  stim- 
ulate it  by  affecting  that  those  who 
deal  in  spiritual  marshmallows  under 
the  Wright  or  Porter  brand  are  igno- 
rant venders  of  adulterated  goods? 
And  why  insist  that  those  who  make 
and  sell  common  cooking  food — say 
Roast  Beef  Medium,  for  example — are 
base  vulgarians.  There  is  no  particu- 
lar virtue  either  of  craftsmanship,  in 
the  making,  or  in  tlie  salesmanship  in 
the  selling  as  between  those  who 
handle  gamy  tripe,  or  marshmallows, 
or  baker's  bread.  And  the  snobbery 
128 


SPLITTING  FICTION  THREE  WAYS 

of  the  tripe  makers  is  as  unjustifiable 
as  the  unction  of  King's  Daughters  at 
the  marshmallow  counter.  And  as 
for  the  disdain  of  the  prune  and  po- 
tato peddler,  the  workers  in  the  other 
two  departments  of  spiritual  refresh- 
ment, it  is  positively  wicked;  if  the 
tripe  department  will  permit  the  use 
even  in  rhetoric  of  a  word  implying 
the  existence  of  right  and  wrong. 

Why  can  we  not  have  a  democracy 
in  our  art,  and  let  posterity  hang  on 
whatever  rewards,  prizes  or  pre- 
miums it  may  choose?  The  novel  is 
only  one  form  of  that  outward  eva- 
nescent expression  of  our  emotions 
which  pass  for  art.  Music,  poetry, 
painting,  sculpture,  architecture,  pos- 
sibly the  despised  movies,  the  drama 
and  home  making  all  are  reflecting 
the  things  that  are  passing  in  our 
hearts.  And  we  have  many  hearts, 
and  are  making  "many  inventions." 
For  the  most  part  they  are  fleeting 
shadows,  whether  upon  the  silver 
screen  or  in  bronze  or  stone  and  steel. 
129 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

They  pass  as  we  pass.  Why  quarrel 
over  the  forms  into  which  we  cast  our 
heart's  desire?  Why  waste  our  time 
setting  up  a  fleeting  aristocracy  in  our 
art?  Why  make  broad  our  critical 
phylacteries,  why  enlarge  the  borders 
of  our  literary  garment?  Why  the 
Dial? 

We  can  cry  ourselves  black  in  the 
face  to  catch  the  ear  of  posterity;  but 
posterity  will  make  its  own  judgments 
about  us.  For  that  matter  is  it  highly 
important  that  posterity  shall  know 
us?  Other  generations  have  passed 
without  leaving  a  mark  in  the  sand. 
Why  should  we  care  which  mark 
identifies  us,  whether  Harold  Bell 
Wright's  or  Booth  Tarkington's  or 
Sherwood  Anderson's?  Neither  tells 
all  about  us.  Each  tells  much. 
And  the  degree  of  truth  in  each  man's 
story  would  seem  hardly  worth  wran- 
gling about  a  hundred  years  hence. 
The  difference  between  Winesburg, 
Ohio  and  The  Shepherd  of  the  Hills, 
or  between  either  and  The  Bent  Twig 
130 


SPLITTING  FICTION  THREE  WAYS 

or  A  Hazard  of  New  Fortunes  may  not 
be  so  important  to  the  reader  of  the 
next  century  as  it  may  seem  to  the 
reader  today.  And  all  the  hundreds 
of  thousands  of  copies  of  The  Shep- 
herd printed  and  sold  would  avail  it 
less  if  possible  in  the  next  century 
than  all  the  critical  claque  for  Wines- 
burg,  Ohio.  The  two  or  three  decades 
of  immortality  of  The  Hazard  and 
The  Twig  will  not  help  them  in  that 
great  day  of  judgment. 

It  is  all  vanity  of  vanities  and  vexa- 
tion of  spirit,  this  price  making  for 
posterity,  this  attempt  to  say  what  is 
good  and  what  bad  with  the  miserable 
rules  and  standards  which  we  are  set- 
ting up  today.  The  novel  is  for  the 
day,  as  the  newspaper  or  the  sky- 
scraper or  the  park  monument  is.  It 
finds  its  market  in  spite  of  our  rules 
of  art.  Each  novel  circulates  upon  its 
own  level.  Its  public  knows  it  instinc- 
tively. Those  seeking  marshmallow 
novels  never  buy  tripe  or  caviar,  nor 
prunes.  And  the  closed  shop  among 
131 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

the  clerks  and  artisans  in  the  literary 
candy  trade,  in  the  fictional  packing 
house,  or  in  the  grocery  store  of  novel 
making,  does  not  stimulate  more  or 
better  produce,  nor  wider  and  more 
intelligent  marketing.  The  Pharisee- 
ism  of  the  workers  in  the  craft  merely 
makes  the  consumer  smile.  He  buys 
what  he  wants,  follows  his  philosophy, 
chases  his  mood,  or  scents  the  desir- 
able fodder  of  the  moment.  The 
novel  he  buys  tells  him  what  he  wishes 
to  know;  and  something  more.  Good 
or  bad  it  fills  him  with  the  spiritual 
pabulum  that  he  needs.  At  the  mo- 
ment of  his  purchase  he  would  reject 
the  kinds  found  in  other  books.  And 
gradually  as  he  gets  a  bellyful,  he  goes 
upward  and  onward,  or  downward 
and  outward  in  his  tastes  and  desires, 
until  if  he  keeps  on  reading  for  a  life- 
time he  knows  about  all  that  our 
novels  have  to  tell  him — all  kinds  of 
them.  Then  reading  has  made  him  a 
full  man.  That  is  the  best  hope  we 
can  have  for  him.  To  that  end  the 
132 


SPLITTING  FICTION  THREE  WAYS 

woodsman,  the  millman,  the  paper 
dealer,  the  printer,  the  binder,  the 
bookseller,  and  the  writer  are  working. 
And  in  the  business  "all  service  ranks 
the  same  with  God!" 


"DREAMING  TRUE" 
Edith  Franklin  Wyatt 


XII 

'DREAMING  TRUE' 


From  time  to  time  dialogues  be- 
tween enterprising  reporters  and 
authors  visiting  this  country  gladden 
the  pages  of  the  daily  press.  Among 
these  I  remember  reading  some  years 
ago  an  opinion  on  novels  which  has 
always  interested  me. 

The  reporter  mentioned  to  the  visit- 
ing author  a  novel  presenting  a  bril- 
liant delineation  of  a  newspaper- 
writer  who  becomes  a  drug-fiend. 

"The  book  is  greatly  over-rated," 
the  visiting  author  replied.  "Why 
this  newspaper-writer — the  hero — is 
only  a  second-rate  man !  I  should  not 
care  to  ask  him  to  my  home  to  lunch." 

Think  of  the  "noted  names  of  fic- 
tion" who  could  not  survive  this 
simple  test.  Consider  the  imaginary 
figures  that  you  can  not  picture  as  en- 
137 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

joying  lunch  with  your  relatives,  and 
with  whom  your  relatives  could  not 
enjoy  lunching.  "I  should  not  care 
to  ask  him  (her)  to  my  home  to 
lunch."  Goneril — or  Regan  either — » 
Bill  Sikes,  Gilbert  Osmond,  Medea, 
Werther,  Bradley  Headstone,  any  of 
the  people  in  Wiithering  Heights — ' 

Without  indulging  myself  further  in 
regarding  this  or  other  aspects  of  this 
quick  test  of  the  value  of  fiction  I  will 
hasten  to  say  that  the  chief  reason 
why  it  seems  so  dismal  an  absurdity  is 
perhaps  because  it  could  only  serve  to 
cut  off  the  visiting  author  from  the 
most  profoundly  entertaining  experi- 
ence fiction  offers.  This  is,  for  me  at 
least,  the  experience  of  "dreaming 
true,"  the  experience  of  being  some 
one  else,  of  being  a  hundred,  a  thou- 
sand other  people. 

2 

This  interest  in  becoming  somebody 
else  has  never  seemed  to  me  to  arise 
from  seeking  novels  as  an  "escape" 
138 


"DREAMING  TRUE" 

from  real  life  or  from  one's  own  life. 
One  enjoys  the  power  of  identification 
with  the  million-peopled  cosmos  of 
novels  not  for  the  negative  reason  of 
seeking  an  escape  but  because  the 
exercise  of  this  power  is  a  positive 
pleasure  in  itself,  comparable  to  the 
pleasure  of  looking  at  well-composed 
colors,  or  of  hearing  sound  beautifully 
ordered. 

If  one  can  not  ask  every  one  to  lunch, 
if  one  can  not  meet,  converse  with,  live 
with,  identify  oneself  with  every  kind 
of  human  life  in  the  pages  of  a  novel, 
then  there  is  no  place  in  the  world 
where  one  can  ask  every  one  to  lunch, 
meet  every  one,  converse  with,  live 
with,  identify  oneself  with  every  form 
of  human  life. 

This  is  in  my  belief  the  chief  dis- 
tinctive contribution  that  the  art  of 
the  novel  makes  to  the  life  of  the 
mind.  In  the  other  arts  of  letters  the 
reader  is  more  or  less  a  listener,  and 
part  of  the  audience.  In  the  art  of  the 
novel  he  is  a  participant. 
139 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

Yet,  besides  this  there  are  of  course 
many  elements  of  existence — too 
many  to  mention — which  are  the  pecu- 
liar province  of  the  novel;  many  kinds 
of  truth  that  no  other  form  of  letters 
is  so  well  fitted  to  express. 

A  way  of  life  over  a  long  space  of 
time;  the  change  of  community  opin- 
ion; the  contrast  of  social  groups;  the 
several  aspects  of  one  man's  or  wom- 
an's nature;  a  correction  of  vision  and 
gradual  revelation;  the  development 
of  human  resources;  above  all  the 
free  and  fecund  power  of  life,  its  vari- 
ety, its  improvisational  force  in  virtue 
of  which  one  situation  grows  out  of 
another  in  many-colored,  creative 
continuance — these  are  some  of  the 
many  truths  that  the  novel  tells  best. 

After  he  had  been  left  by  his  thin- 
hearted  wife,  Lavretzky  in  Turgenev's 
Liza  returns  to  live  on  and  manage  his 
father's  estate: 

There  under  the  window  climbs  the 
large-leaved  burdock  from  the  thick 
grass.   .  .  .   Farther  away  in  the  fields 
140 


"DREAMING  TRUE" 

shines  the  rye,  and  the  oats  are  al- 
ready in  ear,  and  every  leaf  or  tree, 
every  blade  of  grass  on  its  stalls 
stretches  out  to  its  fullest  extent.  ''On 
a  woman's  love  my  best  years  have 
been  wasted,"  Lavretzky  proceeded  to 
think.  "Well,  then,  let  the  dullness 
here  sober  me  and  calm  me  down;  let 
it  educate  me  into  being  able  to  work 
like  others  without  hurrying."  And  he 
again  betook  himself  to  listening  to 
the  silence  without  expecting  any- 
thing, and  yet,  at  the  same  time,  as  if 
expecting  something.  The  stillness 
embraced  him  on  all  sides;  the  sun 
went  down  quietly  in  a  calm,  blue 
sky.  ...  In  other  parts  of  the  world 
at  that  very  moment  life  was  seething 
noisily  bestirring  itself.  Here  was  the 
same  life  flowed  silently  along,  like 
water  over  meadow-grass.  It  was  late 
in  the  evening  before  Lavretzky  could 
tear  himself  away  from  the  contem- 
plation of  this  life  so  quietly  welling 
forth — so  tranquilly  flowing  past. 
Sorrow  for  the  past  melted  in  his 
mind  as  the  snow  melts  in  spring;  but 
strange  to  say,  never  had  the  love  of 
home  exercised  so  strong  or  so  pro- 
found an  influence  upon  him. 

This  has  for  me  the  singular  magic 
of  the  novel's  faculty  for  quietly  well- 
141 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

ing  forth,  the  profound  charm  of  a 
work  in  which  each  part  of  the  tale 
develops  and  enhances  what  has  gone 
before,  and  is  the  moving  prelude  of 
what  is  to  come. 

Many  instances  occur  to  one  of  the 
genius  of  novelists  in  employing  the 
unique  opportunity  the  form  affords 
for  spacious  original  design.  One 
thinks  of  the  magnificent  river-jour- 
ney at  the  close  of  Tono-Bungay 
where  one  rides  and  rides  past  the 
high-piled  tokens  of  changing  civiliza- 
tion out  and  out  to  the  open  sea  from 
which  one  looks  back  with  emotion  at 
the  lives  of  George  and  of  Edward 
Ponderevo  as  seen  from  afar  now, 
through  a  veil  of  reflection  on  the 
greater  ways  of  mortal  dream  and 
and  destiny. 

One  thinks  of  the  tremendous  scene 
of  the  wild  populace  at  the  guillotin- 
ing at  Auxerre  in  The  Old  Wives'  Tale, 
as  contrasted  with  the  staid  persons 
and  streets  of  the  Five  Towns  whence 
Sophia  Baines  has  come  to  stand  at 
142 


"DREAMING  TRUE" 

her  hotel-window   and  look  forth  in 
disgust  and  fascination. 

One  thinks  of  the  wide,  bright  tide 
of  world-letters  and  word-criticism 
bearing  Wilhelm  Meister  through  his 
Lehr-und  Wanderjahre;  and  of  Dau- 
det's  Sappho  wdth  the  painter  Corot 
touched  in  among  the  guests  at  that 
brilliant  ball  in  one  of  the  opening 
chapters.  Vista,  panorama,  multi- 
tude, spontaneous  succession — all 
these  the  novel  tells  us  supremely. 

3 

The  changing  world  of  novels  is  full 
of  surprises.  One  will  have  thought 
that,  in  general,  literary  fashions  are 
rather  unrewarding  and  tend  to  cheap 
standardizations  of  material.  Then 
suddenly  a  literary  fashion  will  be 
productive  of  admirable  results.  Or 
perhaps  it  would  be  more  precise  to 
say  that  often  some  new  theme 
chances  to  be  excellently  expressed  at 
about  the  same  time  by  many 
novelists. 

143 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

Thus  the  past  season  has  been  es- 
pecially rich  in  the  criticism  of  hus- 
bands and  fathers.  Inspired  expo- 
sures have  occurred  on  all  sides — the 
exposure  of  Herbert  Dwight  Deacon, 
the  exposure  of  Mr.  Weemys  in  Vera 
and  the  exposure  of  Mr.  Waddington. 
Among  these  Herbert  Dwight  Deacon 
is  the  most  liberally  treated  by  the 
author.  This  is  to  the  good,  as  liber- 
ality is  seriously  needed  by  the  male 
characters  of  fiction  where  they  are 
too  often  disfranchised  and  appear 
purely  in  a  vicarious  relation  as  sons, 
fathers,  husbands  or  lovers. 

This  vicarious  discriminatory  man- 
ner of  regarding  men  in  fiction  is  es- 
pecially noticeable  in  the  character  of 
Tito  Melema.  Seen  solely  from  the 
standpoint  of  his  exceedingly  feeble 
abilities  as  a  lover,  Tito,  though  phys- 
ical beauty  is  almost  too  richly  lav- 
ished upon  him  by  his  creator,  has 
never  the  slightest  chance  as  a  human 
being.  Always  in  a  miserable  subor- 
dinate state  as  a  mere  adjunct  of  Ro- 
144 


"DREAMING  TRUE" 

mola  he  is  never  for  an  instant  per- 
mitted to  come  forward  except  on  the 
depressing  grounds  of  love  and  beauty 
and  as  a  sort  of  male  houri.  His  posi- 
tion is  far  more  discouraging  than 
that  of  Nora  in  A  Doll's  House.  And 
one  need  only  compare  Ninian  Dea- 
con's treatment  as  a  bigamist  by  his 
creator  to  Tito's  treatment  as  a  biga- 
mist by  his  creator  to  appreciate  the 
increase  of  enfranchisement  for  males 
in  fiction. 

Perhaps  it  is  because  of  the  recent 
overshadowing  appreciation  of  Miss 
Lulu  Belt  that  one  has  not  heard 
much  of  an  extremely  beautiful  and 
original  novel  of  Miss  Zona  Gale's  en- 
titled Birth, 

It  is  the  story  of  a  "superfluous 
man"  in  a  Wisconsin  town,  the  story 
of  a  whole  town  of  men  and  w^omen,  a 
place  most  individually  perceived. 
Yet  its  outline  has  some  of  the  national 
angles  of  the  town  that  imprisoned 
Thoreau,  and  where  Stephen  Crane 
saw  the  tragedy  of  The  Monster, 
145 


THE  NOVEL  OF  TOMORROW 

Years  flow  by  and  the  changes  of 
years.  Death  is  here  and  love  and 
pain,  all  touched  with  swift  ironic  hu- 
mor. Each  soul  is  imagined  by  this 
humor,  and  in  the  wisdom  of  truth 
intimate  and  profound.  The  neigh- 
bors walk  past  in  the  evening — the 
wise,  the  silly,  the  generous,  the  small. 
The  band  plays.  The  trains  thunder 
overland.  And  you  walk  in  sun  and 
rain  where 

Burage  numbers  her  trees  by  thou- 
sands. In  the  morning  the  sun  comes 
in  strong  gold,  lavished  upon  the 
grass,  save  where  the  leaves  lay  their 
bright  veils.  All  the  narrow  green 
strips  outside   the  walks  turn  bright. 

In  rain  the  town,  like  any  other,  ly- 
ing folded  in  a  visible  medium,  be- 
comes an  enclosure  cut  off  from  some- 
thing. Rooms  become  more  intimate. 
Something  ceases,  and  something  is 
present  instead. 

You  walk  under  the  thousand-num- 
bered trees  over  the  November  pave- 
ments.   The  possibilities  of  your  fast- 
flying  life  hurry  past  you  unrealized; 
146 


"DREAMING  TRUE" 

and  at  their  passage  you  despair  and 
laugh  at  yourself  and  hope  again. 
Your  heart  burns  at  the  mean  injus- 
tice of  existence,  its  petty  cruelty  and 
hardness  to  those  who  are  forgotten 
upon  earth.  Sometimes  I  have 
thought  every  splendid  novel  is  about 
justice  and  injustice.  This  novel  has 
the  presence  of  genius.  When  you 
read  it  something  ceases;  and  some- 
thing is  present  instead. 

It  has  the  power  of  social  imagina- 
tion, the  light  which  beyond  any  other 
illumines  the  art  of  the  novel;  and 
makes  us  hope  ever  to  dream  more 
truly  of  all  the  mortal  fortunes  in  our 
world. 

THE  END 


PA) 


THE  LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

Santa  Barbara 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW. 


Series  9482 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


AA    001064  171    0 


